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THREE    MODERN    SEERS 


{F$y  the  same  Author. 

KIT'S  WOMAN. 

"  In  its  way  this  is  a  little  work  of  genius  ;  its 
appeal  is  direct,  its  moral  teaching  forcible, 
without  a  suggestion  of  cant.  In  the  delightful 
Cornish  dialect  of  the  different  characters  is 
contained  a  mass  of  stringent  philosophy  on 
love  and  life  which  hits  one  with  the  force  of 
novelty,  as  well  as  falling  on  the  ear  with  the 
music,  almost,  of  poetry." — Bystander. 

MY  CORNISH    NEIGHBOURS. 

"Mrs.  Havelock  Ellis'  unity  is  the  unity  of 
one  actual  place.  She  studies  her  Cornish 
neighbours  with  that  quiet  and  patient  pleasure 
which  is  necessary  for  getting  the  truth  out  of 
any  rooted  and  real  people." 

G.  K.  Chesterton  in  the  Daily  News. 

ATTAINMENT. 

"Mrs.  Havelock  Ellis  gives  us  here  a  story 
of  enthusiasms,  of  high  ideals,  and  hearty 
attempts  to  reach  them.  There  is  a  certain 
wise  simplicity  about  the  way  the  story  is  told, 
which,  while  showing  appreciation  of  the 
ideals,  also  shows  in  sympathetic  manner 
where  they  must  fail  of  attainment." 

Daily  Telegraph. 


\J^uuJ^%<jjJ^^ 


THREE 
MODERN  SEERS 


By 
MRS.    HAVELOCK   ELLIS 


LONDON  : 

STANLEY     PAUL     &     CO 

i    CLIFFORD'S   INN 


PRINTED   BY 

HAZELI.,   WATSON   AND  VINEY,    LD., 

LONDON  AND  AYLESBURY. 


THIS     BOOK     IS     DEDICATED 

TO 

MY    HUSBAND 

HAVELOCK    ELLIS 

WHOSE    HELP    IN    MY    WORK 
HAS     BEEN     ITS     GREATEST     STIMULUS 


%^r  ^r    J*.     ~i     ^.*^  I 


PREFACE 

The  three  men  I  have  called  seers  in  these 
chapters  have  been  chosen  as  representing 
various  sides  of  the  moral,  intellectual,  and 
spiritual  outlook  of  our  age.  Hinton, 
a  veritable  Don  Quixote  of  the  newer 
morality,  Nietzsche,  a  modern  Lucifer  of 
the  intellect,  and  Carpenter,  a  Child  of  the 
Spirit,  all  meet  on  the  common  ground  of 
a  striving  towards  perfection  of  individual 
character  as  the  chief  factor  in  social 
progress.  However  contradictory  their 
methods  may  appear  at  first  sight,  these 
prophets  of  a  sane  morality  are  at  one  in 
their  plea  for  a  solidarity  working  from 
within  outwards.  In  their  individual  con- 
ceptions we  find  that  their  belief  is,  that 
evil  is  the  handmaid  of  good,  and  that  good 


8  PREFACE 

is  the  ultimate  conclusion  of  the  whole 
matter.  If  the  messages  of  these  three 
latter-day  prophets  were  amalgamated,  a 
practical  working  scheme  for  daily  living 
could  be  easily  evolved.  To  have  the 
courage  to  face  problems  according  to 
Hinton,  to  dare  to  knock  down  traditions 
and  conventions  according  to  Nietzsche, 
to  be  serene  and  brave  enough  to  live  out 
what  we  have  discovered,  through  our 
introspection  and  destruction,  according  to 
Carpenter,  is  the  way  to  the  larger  vision 
and  the  definite  action.  Every  experiment 
in  fine  living  is  a  novitiate  for  the  newer 
experience  which  is  bound  to  follow.  To- 
day we  are  on  the  verge  of  a  great  up- 
heaval in  our  social  life,  and  the  followers 
of  men  like  these  three  seers  of  the  new 
order  must  have  the  courage  to  work  into 
definite  action  the  ideals  the  forerunners 
have  proclaimed. 

I  have  not  attempted  to  put  these  studies 
into  literary  style,  but  present  them  prac- 


PREFACE  9 

tically  as  they  were  delivered  from  the 
lecture  platform  some  years  ago,  in  the 
hope  that  they  may  help  those  who  are 
groping  in  the  new  paths,  and  who  may 
be  glad  of  a  few  hints  as  to  the  byways 
which  lead  to  the  open  road. 

E.  M.  O.  Ellis. 

Carbis  Bay  Cornwall. 
March,  1910. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  I 

JAMES    HINTON'S    LIFE 

Hinton  a  believer  in  the  marriage  of  science  and  religion — 
His  teaching  an  outcome  of  his  unconventional  life — 
Hinton's  progressiveness  and  aggressiveness — Died  before 
his  time — Why  he  is  a  great  moral  teacher— His  analogy 
of  painting  and  morality — A  saviour  of  women — Passion  a 
basis  of  ethics — "Myself  in  and  for  others"         .     pp.   17-50 


CHAPTER  II 

JAMES    HINTON'S  ETHICS 

Hinton's  personal  characteristics  —  A  forerunner  of 
Nietzsche  and  Carpenter — Affinities  of  genius  with  weakness 
— Nature  and  morality — Physical  and  spiritual  worlds  one — 
Hinton's  "dangerous  views" — Monogamy  and  polygamy — 
Asceticism  and  excess — Hinton's  conception  of  true  sexual 

freedom pp.  53-87 

11 


12  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  III 

THE    MYSTERY    OF    PAIN 

Pain  biologically  a  guardian  angel  of  the  body — Also 
guardian  angel  of  9011I — Examples  in  life — "  Forward  ends  " 
of  pain pp.  91-120 

CHAPTER  IV 

THE   MYSTERY   OF   PLEASURE 

False  conception  of  pleasure — Hinton's  view  of  it  as  lover 
of  nature  and  mystic — The  ascetic  and  sensualist  foes  to 
right  understanding  of  pleasure— Pleasure  a  right  in  itself — 
Restraint  alone  not  enough — Sexual  love  as  a  sacrament — 
Nature  makes  goodness  and  pleasure  one  in  the  marriage 
relation — Relationship  between  man  and  woman  a  mystical 
one pp.  123-153 


CHAPTER  V 

NIETZSCHE    AND    MORALS 

Nietzsche  a  breaker  of  standard  moral  values — Mere 
morality  valueless— Individuality  the  first  thing  to  obtain — 
Nietzsche  a  tonic — Views  on  sin  and  suffering — Antagonism 
to  sympathy — Nietzsche's  views  on  women — His  attitude  to 
Christianity pp.  157-181) 


CONTENTS  13 

CHAPTER  VI 

EDWARD   CARPENTER'S   MESSAGE  TO   HIS  AGE 

Carpenter's  personal  serenity — Reason  for  this — His  atti- 
tude to  the  problems  of  the  moment — His  conception  of  true 
democracy — His  attitude  to  love,  death,  and  failure — Real 
life  from  within — Faith  and  its  result       .         .     pp.  193-227 


CHAPTER    I 

JAMES    HINTON'S    LIFE 


CHAPTER   I 

JAMES    HINTON'S    LIFE 

Hinton  a  believer  in  the  marriage  of  science  and 
religion— His  teaching  an  otitcome  of  his  uncon- 
ventional life  —  Hinton's  progressiveness  and 
aggressiveness— Died  before  his  time — Why  he 
is  a  great  moral  teacher— His  analogy  of  painting 
and  morality— A  saviour  of  -women— Passion  a 
basis  of  ethics—"  Myself  in  and  for  others." 

James  Hinton's  name  is  known  to  many, 
but  the  essential  characteristics  of  the  man 
and  his  work  are  known  to  few.  Fear — 
the  fear  of  the  orthodox  towards  the  newer 
revelation  of  truth — lias  stood  in  the  way 
of  a  true  understanding  of  a  real  seer. 
A  man  who  dared  to  say,  "  Christ  was 
the  Saviour  of  men,  but  I  am  the  saviour 
of  women,  and  I  don't  envy  Him  a  bit," 
has  to  be  reckoned  with  in  a  different  way 
from  the  one  chosen  by  Ellice  Hopkins  in 


18      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

the  Life  and  Letters  of  James  Hinton? 
which,  so  far,  is  the  only  personal  record 
we  have  of  this  man. 

Hinton  was  a  force,  a  great  force,  be- 
cause he  was  a  veritable  child  of  Nature 
as  well  as  a  practical  doctor,  a  mystic,  and 
a  very  warm-hearted  human  creature.  A 
child  of  Nature  and  a  seer  can  unravel  a 
few  mysteries  for  us.  "  Practical  mystics," 
said  Lord  Rosebery  once,  when  speaking 
of  Gordon,  "are  among  the  great  driving 
forces  of  the  world." 

The  more  we  study  James  Hinton  the 
more  we  realise  that  he  was  such  a  driving 
force,  and  he  came  with  his  message  at 
a  time  when  science  seemed  at  war  with 
religion.  Hinton  was  a  modern  seer  who 
realised  some  of  the  strange  wonders  that 
may  arise  from  the  mystic  marriage  of 
science  with  religion.  We  are  learning 
more  and  more  that  this  union  is  not  a 
wizard's  dream,  but  a  great  reality.  Hinton 
was  one  of  the  first   modern  scientists  to 


HINTON'S   LIFE  19 

realise  that  the  physical  and  the  spiritual 

are  not  two  worlds,  but  one,  the  physical 

being    the    appearance   or  phenomenon   of 

which  the  spiritual  is  the  reality. 

"  Matter,"  says  Hinton,  "  is  a  mere  symbol  or 
expression,  without  any  meaning  of  its  own,  for  some 
unknown  fact.  To  deny  it  is  no  less  absurd  than  to 
assert  it ;  it  has  to  be  interpreted.11 

What  Hinton  felt  to  be  more  important 
than  to  invent,  or  even  to  discover,  another 
world,  was  to  rightly  interpret  this,  and 
here  comes  in  the  sanity  of  this  man  as 
against  those  who,  while  trying  to  grasp  the 
things  beyond  their  reach,  fail  to  understand 
and  interpret  what  is  under  their  eyes  and 
waiting  for  service  at  their  hands. 

"  We  are  in  the  spiritual  and  eternal  world,11  wrote 
Hinton  :  "  there  is  no  other  in  which  we  can  be,  for 
there  is  no  other.  These  physical  existences,  as  we 
call  them,  are  the  spiritual  and  eternal  existence 
as  it  is  perceived  by  us,  related  to  the  true  existence, 
as  the  '  appearance 1  perceived  by  the  eye  is  related 
to  the  physical  object  of  which  it  is  the  appearance. 
That  is,  our  existences  are  the  phenomena  of  the 
eternal  existence.11 


20      THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

Hinton  knew  that  there  is  really  no  need 
for  us,  at  intervals,  to  insist  on  people  fixing 
their  thoughts  on  eternal  tilings,  for  he 
realised  well  enough  that  there  are  no  others. 
All  this  to  him  was  not  cant,  but  revelation, 
and  joy,  and  freedom,  as  it  was  to  Sweden- 
borg  and  Joan  of  Arc  after  their  revelations. 
Hinton,  however,  was  before  his  time,  and 
he  shared  the  fate  of  his  kind.  He  was 
tortured  by  mediocrity.  His  message  was 
too  big,  and  his  interpreters  were  too  small. 
The  consequence  is,  that  he  stands  to-day 
in  the  public  mind  as  a  cross  between  a 
dangerous  sensualist  and  an  impossible 
idealist,  and,  though  tongues  wag  over  him 
and  heads  shake,  the  real  man  and  his  real 
mission  remain  unfocussed. 

To  understand  a  man  and  his  work  it  is 
necessary  to  follow  the  life  which  makes 
the  work.  I  knew  Mrs.  Hinton  and  also 
Miss  Caroline  H addon,  Mrs.  Hinton  s  sister 
and  Hinton's  great  helper  in  his  work.  I 
have  also  had  the  valuable  help  of  his  great 


HINTONS   LIFE  21 

friend  and  co-worker,  Mrs.  Boole,  in  pre- 
paring these  chapters  on  Hinton's  life  and 
work,  so  that  I  feel  I  may  speak  with  a 
certain  authority,  and  without  impertinence, 
on  some  matters  which  are  not  realised 
about  this  mystic  scientist,  of  whom  indeed 
it  might  be  written  over  any  mistakes  he 
may  have  made,  "  Much  shall  be  forgiven 
him,  for  he  loved  much." 

James  Hinton  was  the  son  of  a  well- 
known  Baptist  minister,  the  Rev.  Howard 
Hinton,  and  Eliza  Birt,  his  wife.  He  was 
born  at  Reading  in  1822,  and  was  the  third 
of  eleven  children.  His  father  was  an  excel- 
lent geologist  and  naturalist,  and  it  is  said 
that  he  was  an  eloquent  preacher.  This 
eloquence  was  certainly  inherited  by  his  son, 
who  often  outran  eloquence  in  an  incon- 
tinence of  speech  which  led  him  into  many 
difficulties  of  action.  A  breath  of  scandal 
on  these  difficulties  by  casual  outsiders,  who 
rarely  can  truly  interpret  what  they  neither 
know  nor  understand,  may  account  for  some 


22       THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

of  the  wild  stories  still  current  about  this 
man,  who  understood  and  helped  women 
and  so  was  often  misinterpreted  by  those 
whom  he  had  helped  most. 

James  Hinton's  chief  characteristics  were 
inherited  from  his  mother,  who  was  a  rare 
personality.  Probably  Hinton's  attitude 
towards  all  women  came  in  the  first  instance 
from  his  love  of  one  woman,  his  mother. 
His  childhood  was  happy,  but  the  loss  of  his 
brother  Howard,  from  scarlet  fever,  brought 
him  in  contact  with  stern  realities  when  he 
was  about  twelve.  He  then  became  his 
mother's  right  hand.  He  never  went  to  a 
public  school  or  college,  and  this  may 
account  for  much  that  was  characteristic 
and  peculiar  in  his  character.  Perhaps  we 
may  rightly  attribute  Hinton's  entire  absence 
of  prejudice,  and  his  singular  freedom  from 
the  intellectual  prepossessions  of  any  par- 
ticular school  of  thought,  to  this  fact. 

Yet,  realising  the  innate  individuality 
of  the  man,  one  hesitates   to   declare  that 


HINTONS    LIFE  23 

Winchester  or  Oxford  would  have  pruned 
him  into  a  conventional  shape.  He  was 
so  entirely  himself.  He  was  quite  un- 
traditionalised  about  his  clothes,  his  ideals, 
his  aims,  and  his  actions.  The  man  who 
went  down  Fleet  Street  barefooted  and 
dressed  as  a  beggar  in  order  to  understand 
the  feelings  of  a  tramp,  and  who  got  drunk 
simply  to  see  if  he  would  feel  inclined  to 
beat  his  wife,  might  have  been  influenced 
a  great  deal  through  such  experiments,  but 
very  little  through  a  public-school  and 
college  routine.  The  friend  who  came  to 
see  him  and  found  him  eating  a  mutton 
chop  and  dissecting  a  human  ear  at  the 
same  time,  would  have  found  it  difficult  to 
place  this  intense,  enthusiastic,  unconven- 
tional, and  in  many  ways  uncontrolled  nature 
under  the  banner  of  "  good  form "  and 
"  balance "  to  which  the  world  gives  its 
favour. 

It  is  true  Hinton  lacked  ballast,  and  his 
philosophy  needs  co-ordinating,  but  it  is  a 


24       THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

philosophy  which  repays  investigation  and 
which  as  yet  has  not  been  given  in  its 
fulness  to  the  world. 

This  seer,  with  the  almond-shaped  blue 
eyes,  liquid  as  a  woman's,  soft  skin,  brown 
hair,  long  and  high  forehead,  narrow,  pallid 
and  hollow  cheeks,  large  quivering  nostrils, 
and  curved  mouth  betokening  the  ascetic 
and  the  sensualist  alike— the  upper  lip  being 
thin,  and  the  lower  full  and  sensitive — this 
quivering,  vibrating  creature,  dreadfully  thin, 
not  with  illness,  but  through  the  fire  which 
consumed  him,  this  muscularly  strong  man 
with  the  tenderness  of  a  woman,  has  still  to 
be  reckoned  with  in  our  solution  of  modern 
problems. 

We  have  many  things  to  face  in  the  near 
future.  Perhaps  the  biggest  revolution  the 
world  has  ever  known  is  close  at  hand — the 
revolution  of  love.  Hinton  is  a  distinct 
herald  of  purer  and  saner  revelations  than 
we  dare  as  yet  to  realise.  He  was  not  only 
a  very  original  thinker  on  many  matters, 


HINTON'S   LIFE 


ZO 


but  during  the  last  five  years  of  his  life  he 
was  as  a  prophet  consumed  with  a  terrific 
message. 

In  1872,  three  years  before  his  death,  in  a 
letter  to  Miss  Haddon,  he  said  he  had  a 
feeling  that  his  unpublished  manuscripts 
would  be  far  the  most  important  of  his 
works,  for  he  knew  that  the  records  of  his 
thinking  would  be  more  far-reaching  than 
his  made-up  books.  It  is  with  some  of  these 
manuscripts  that  I  propose  to  deal. 

Hinton's  great  love  of  truth,  his  immense 
intellectual  courage,  which  led  him  to  accept 
the  consequences  of  any  logical  conclusion, 
whatever  it  might  cost  him,  make  this 
suggestive  thinker  and  his  work  valuable  to 
modern  students  of  sociology  and  ethics. 
Hinton's  purity  of  life  and  intense  love 
of  two  women,  his  mother  and  his  wife, 
his  harebrained  and  impulsive  assertions, 
at  times,  to  the  unreasoning  small-talkers 
around  him,  from  whom  he  always  expected 
understanding,   in   spite    of    the    continual 


26      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

well-meaning  misinterpretation  of  his  aims 
and  his  life,  endear  him  to  us,  because  of 
his  great  humanity  and  his  love  of  truth. 
He  missed  the  advantages  and  disadvantages 
of  a  public-school  and  college  training,  but 
the  world  educated  him  in  a  very  real  sense. 

The  first  work  he  did  to  earn  his  living 
was  to  take  a  situation  as  a  youth  at  a 
wholesale  draper's  in  Whitechapel.  Here 
he  realised,  in  a  way  he  never  forgot,  the 
cruelty  of  the  undeveloped  man  and  the 
degradation  of  the  wronged  woman.  His 
life  in  Whitechapel  made  its  mark  on  all 
his  future  life,  though  he  was  only  there  a 
year.  After  that  he  went  to  Bristol  as  an 
insurance  clerk.  At  nineteen  he  fell  in  love 
with  Margaret  Haddon.  One  feels  very 
tender  towards  this  ill-clothed,  uncouth, 
reserved  youth,  who  could  not  express  his 
feelings  and  who  only  turned  white  when 
in  the  presence  of  the  woman  he  loved. 

James  Hinton  could  never  be  made  to 
care    about    his    outward    appearance.      I 


HINTON'S    LIFE  27 

remember  well  how  Mrs.  Hinton  emphasised 
the  fact  of  the  incompatibility  of  genius, 
not  only  with  tidiness,  but  with  domestic 
happiness.  She  knew,  Hinton  knew,  we  all 
know,  that  mediocrity  of  temperament  is 
the  best  security  for  domestic  happiness,  but 
domestic  happiness  may  not  be  the  be-all 
and  end-all  of  the  divine  plan  for  all  Nature's 
children.  Hinton  was  a  veritable  child  of 
Nature,  and  he  was  also  a  genius,  in  the 
sense  that  he  has  interpreted  genius,  as  a 
vehicle  through  which  the  intimate  heart 
of  Nature  can  express  herself  for  God,  a 
temperament  of  impulse  and  naturalness 
whose  affinity  is  more  often  with  weakness 
than  with  strength.  Genius  is  not,  accord- 
ing to  Hinton,  supreme,  intellectual  or  other 
power,  but  unconscious  and  glad  obedience 
to  the  impulses  of  Nature. 

In  his  twentieth  year  Hinton  entered  at 
St.  Bartholomew's,  and  when  he  had  quali- 
fied he  practised  as  assistant  surgeon  at 
Newport  in  Essex.     Here  we  get  the  first 


28      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

record  of  his  religious  doubts.  The  time 
had  arrived  when  he  felt  he  must  cast  off  the 
orthodox  views  he  had  gained  from  others 
and  search  for  truth  for  himself,  and  not 
only  for  himself,  but  to  reassure  the  woman 
he  loved.  We  have  a  glimpse  into  the 
double  agony  he  went  through  when  he  felt 
lie  must  renounce  every  cherished  belief. 
He  knew,  young  as  he  was,  that  no  good 
woman  can  really  dedicate  herself  except  to 
a  dedicated  man.  He  began  even  in  his 
youth  to  realise — what  it  takes  some  of  us 
nearly  all  our  lives  to  grasp— that  neither 
comfort,  money,  fame,  nor  even  love  itself 
can  satisfy  any  life  which  is  not  first  dedi- 
cated to  truth  and  the  service  of  others. 

The  tension  of  Hinton's  mind  about  re- 
ligion was  relieved  by  a  journey  to  Jamaica 
in  1847,  as  medical  officer  in  an  emigrant 
ship.  During  a  year's  absence  we  find  in 
his  letters  to  his  future  wife  that  things 
were  opening  out  for  him.  On  his  return 
he  became  engaged  to  Margaret  H addon,  and 


HINTON'S   LIFE  29 

he  was  then  a  dedicated  man  in  two  senses 
— to  a  woman  and  to  work.  The  curious 
combination  of  arrogance  and  humility  which 
we  find  in  his  letters  at  this  time  gives  the 
keynote  to  all  his  future  life.  He  seemed 
always  to  be  either  kicking  against  the 
pricks  or  bowing  his  head.  "  I  look  upon 
myself  as  a  sort  of  conglomeration  of  faults, 
a  kind  of  aggregate  of  defects  put  into  a 
bodily  shape,"  he  says. 

In  1852  he  married,  and  in  1853  his  first 
child,  Howard,  was  born,  and  then  we  get  a 
ten  years'  record  of  hard  work  and  domestic 
happiness,  not  without  struggle,  for  more 
children  came,  and  his  income  was  small. 

It  is  very  interesting  to  follow  him 
through  his  work  as  a  general  practitioner. 
In  these  days  it  is  a  universally  received  fact 
that  mind  can  affect  matter.  To  Hinton  it 
came  as  a  great  revelation  when  he  was 
studying  homeopathy  that — 

"  anything  that  acts  on  the  emotions  will  cause  or 
cure  disease,  because  of  the  simple  fact  that  all  the 


30      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

emotions  produce  a  specific  effect  upon  the  small 
vessels,  the  capillaries,  which  expand  under  exciting 
and  pleasing  emotions  and  contract  under  depressing 
ones.1'' 

We  have  only  to  look  around  us  and  we 
can  see  daily  before  us  emotions  setting  up 
those  processes  which  cause  diseases  and  cure 
them.  One  rarely  finds  a  person  who  is 
passionately  in  love  ill,  and  one  rarely  finds 
a  bad-tempered  grumbler  well.  Hinton 
gives  an  instance  of  the  triumph  of  mind 
over  matter  during  his  study  of  homeopathy, 
which  led  him  to  many  of  his  conclusions 
about  suggestion.  One  of  the  physicians 
at  the  Homeopathic  Hospital  wanted  to  go 
to  the  Derby,  but  there  were  still  some 
patients  to  see,  and  two  of  the  cases  were 
serious.  Hinton  took  his  friend's  duty,  and 
as  he  had  experimented  often  with  bread 
pills,  he  gave  these  patients  sugar  of  milk. 
Some  days  after,  both  patients  came  again, 
cured.  One  had  found  his  pains  much 
worse  after  the  physic,  but  he  soon  began 


HINTONS   LIFE  31 

to    mend,    and    the    other    was    cured    at 
once ! 

Social  and  moral  questions  gradually 
became  absorbing  matters  in  Hinton's  life. 
He  jotted  down  his  impressions,  theories 
and  facts,  every  night.  The  manuscripts  to 
which  I  have  had  access  would  alone  be  a 
life's  work  for  any  man,  but  when  one  thinks 
of  him  as  a  celebrated  aurist  and  also  a 
writer  of  such  published  books  as  Man  and 
His  Dwelling- Place,  and  Life  in  Nature, 
there  is  no  wonder  that  the  brain  gradually 
became  overtaxed  and  that  the  man  died 
before  his  time.  His  thoughts  were  always 
written  down  as  they  came  to  him,  and  they 
continually  outgrew  their  expression.  To 
pick  out  his  meaning  from  these  rapidly 
written  pages  is  sometimes  almost  as  difficult 
as  it  was  for  his  hearers  to  unravel  sense 
from  nonsense,  when  he  incessantly  talked 
out  to  all  sorts  of  muddle-headed  people 
the  results  of  his,  as  yet,  unformulated  con- 
clusions.    His  passionate  desire  for  know- 

3 


32       THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

ledge  made  him  long  to  give  up  his  life  to 
philosophy,  but  in  18G3  he  resolutely  locked 
his  manuscripts  away  and  accepted  an 
appointment  as  aural  surgeon  at  Guy's 
Hospital.  At  the  same  time  he  worked  a 
specialist's  practice  in  the  West  End. 
Money  worries  obliged  him  to  do  this, 
and  there  was  no  other  way  out  while 
he  had  a  wife  and  family  depending  on 
him. 

In  1866  Mr.  Toynbee,  his  great  friend 
and  fellow-worker,  died,  and  Hinton  suc- 
ceeded to  his  practice  and  lived  in  Savile 
Row.  Then,  at  last,  came  the  reaction 
from  the  torture  of  money  worries,  and 
prosperity  and  congenial  friends  made  life 
a  different  thing  for  James  Hinton. 

In  1869  he  felt  justified  in  unlocking  his 
manuscripts,  and  he  devoted  his  evenings 
to  philosophy.  He  worked  feverishly  to 
make  up  for  lost  time,  and  the  strain  was 
too  great.  His  large  practice,  his  incessant 
activity,  and  the  mere  mechanical  writing 


HINTON'S   LIFE  33 

of  his  manuscripts  were  alone  too  much 
for  one  man's  nervous  strength. 

In  1871  he  passed  through  what  Ellice 
Hopkins  calls  a  moral  revolution,  but  she 
is  careful  not  to  tell  us  what  that  revolution 
was.  No  competent  biographer  of  James 
Hinton  can,  however,  ignore  this.  He, 
above  all  men,  would  like  the  world  to 
profit  by  what  he  foresaw  and  endured  in 
the  foretelling ;  and  in  these  chapters  on 
James  Hinton  I  shall  deal  with  these  sub- 
jects in  an  open  and  fearless  way. 

I  do  not  want  to  hurt  the  susceptibilities 
of  any  student  or  disciple  of  his  who,  ac- 
cepting his  more  orthodox  sayings,  is  yet 
nervous  of  his  later  conclusions  and  sug- 
gestions. I  feel,  however,  that  a  man  of 
this  type  needs  an  interpreter  who  has 
no  fear  of  what  the  world  may  say  or 
what  the  world  can  do  if  the  truth  is 
given  to  it. 

No  sincerity  of  purpose,  no  perplexed 
striving  for  truth,  no  action  however  igno- 


34      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

rant  and  painful  in  its  results,  need  crave 
for  an  apology  from  a  world  whose  pre- 
vailing creed  is,  not  the  fine  one  Hinton 
proclaimed,  "  Love  and  do  what  you  like," 
but  "  Do  what  you  like,  only  don't  be  found 
out."  I  shall  make  no  excuse,  later  on,  for 
saying  the  truth,  as  far  as  I  know  it,  of  this 
man's  conclusions  on  some  grave  questions. 

A  single,  big,  loving  and  humble  nature 
like  that  of  James  Hinton  will,  nay,  must, 
through  its  very  warmth  and  impulsive- 
ness, make  mistakes ;  but  mistakes  are  not 
treacheries  against  love  and  the  eternal 
verities,  but  experiments  in  self-education. 
Once  we  look  upon  eternity  as  being  here 
and  now,  death  is  seen  as  a  mere  station 
on  our  journey.  It  was  surely  this  to 
Hinton.  Hinton  was  a  man  who  gave  to 
the  world  a  message  he  was  too  hurried 
to  co-ordinate,  and  who  died  before  his  time 
and  before  he  could  even  grasp  the  might 
of  his  own  gospel. 

James   Hinton  had   a  very  special  mes- 


HINTONS   LIFE  35 

sage  for  humanity,  but  it  has  not  been 
delivered  yet.  This  message  is  even  more 
peculiarly  valuable  in  that  he  had  not  the 
serenity  of  faith  of  Edward  Carpenter  or  the 
egoism  and  intellectual  pride  of  Nietzsche. 
A  man  who  is  seeking  attracts  the  seeker ; 
a  man  who  is  honest  helps  truth.  Hinton 
was  a  searcher  for  realities  and  a  single  and 
devoted  lover  of  Nature  and  her  laws. 

Though  he  had  not  "  arrived,"  he  has, 
perhaps,  through  that  very  fact,  helped 
some  to  see  further  than  might  otherwise 
have  been  possible,  and  for  the  sake  of 
what  we  owe  him  we  have  no  right  to 
keep  back  a  word  of  his  meaning  if  we  feel 
we  can  in  any  way  interpret  his  intricate 
philosophy.  Whether  his  conclusions  are 
false  or  true,  the  man  himself  was  true 
and  so  deserves  a  hearing. 

As  late  as  1870  he  wrote  in  a  letter  : 

"  Will  my  friends  try  after  I  am  dead,  for  I 
cannot  do  it  myself;  I  cannot  say  it  as  I  mean  and 
wish  to  tell  the  world,  how  beautiful  and  rich  and 


36       THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

absolutely  good,  full  of  joy  and  gladness  beyond 
all  that  heart  can  wish  or  imagination  paint,  I  feel 
that  the  world  is,  this  human  life.11 

In  1874  he  gave  up  his  practice  and  spent 
the  summer  in  Lulworth  in  Dorsetshire. 
In  his  last  letter  to  his  son  he  says : 

"There  is  a  wrong,  an  intense  wrong,  in  our  society, 
running  all  through  our  life,  and  it  will  be  made 
righter  some  day.  I  dashed  myself  against  it,  but 
it  is  not  one  man's  strength  that  can  move  it.  It 
was  too  much  for  my  brain,  but  it  is  by  the  failure 
of  some  that  others  succeed,  and  by  my  very  foolish- 
ness, perhaps,  there  shall  come  a  better  success  to 
others,  perhaps  more  than  any  cleverness  or  wisdom 
of  mine  could  have  wrought,  and  I  hope  I  have 
learnt,  too,  to  be  wiser.  We  have  not  come  to  the 
end,  though  I  am  so  exhausted  that  I  seem  scarcely 
able  to  believe  in  anything  more  before  me." 

James  Hinton  died  very  suddenly  at  the 
last,  of  acute  inflammation  of  the  brain. 
He  had  gone  to  the  Azores  to  see  if  a 
change  would  rest  him,  but  he  died  at 
Porta  Delgada  in  a  hospital,  after  a  few 
days  of  intense  suffering,  in  which  he  knew 


HINTON'S   LIFE  37 

no  one.  This  was  on  December  16th,  1875, 
when  he  was  fifty-three  years  of  age. 

What  is  the  particular  line  of  thought 
which  this  extraordinary  man  has  left  us 
to  work  out  ?  What  object  had  he  before 
him  in  searching  out  and  combining  so 
many  curious  and  interesting  details  of 
psychology  and  metaphysics  ? 

Hinton  always  looked  on  the  art  of  the 
teacher  as  superior  to  that  of  the  doctor, 
and  he  considered  it  monstrous  that  children 
should  be  taught  nothing  of  morals  and  of 
their  duties  as  citizens.  This  many-sided 
man  was  pre-eminently  a  teacher — a  great 
moral  teacher  more  than  anything  else — 
and  all  the  arts  he  loved  helped  him  to  his 
moral  conclusions.  He  was  a  passionate 
lover  of  music,  and  it  gave  him  intense 
delight  to  follow  the  way  in  which  music 
was  constructed.  He  used  to  bury  his 
face  in  his  hands  when  something  he  liked 
was  being  played  at  the  Monday  Popular 
Concerts,  and  those  who  were  near  him  said 


38       THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

that  he  looked  afterwards  as  if  lie  had  passed 
through  a  great  spiritual  crisis. 

As  Miss  Ellice  Hopkins  truly  says,  his 
most  marked  peculiarity  was  the  intensely 
emotional  character  of  his  intellect.  In 
approaching  his  solution  of  many  moral 
problems  we  must  always  bear  this  in  mind, 
and  also  we  must  remember  that  in  many 
ways  he  needed  ballast.  In  spite  of  this, 
however,  here  and  there,  and,  in  fact,  in 
the  greater  part  of  his  work  and  conclusions, 
we  must  also  remember  that  we  are  dealing 
with  a  seer,  one  who  could,  and  did,  pierce 
the  veil  of  the  commonplace  and  so-called 
material  facts  of  life  and  see  beyond.  In 
this  very  matter  of  music  he  says  : 

"  I  perceive  how  music  represents  the  universe. 
It  is  an  ideal,  and  it  is  emphatically  a  representative 
of  the  universe  because  it  especially  embraces  discords, 
things  evil  in  themselves,  yet  making  an  essential 
part  of  the  perfection  of  the  whole.'11 

His  study  of  pictures  came  later,  and  his 
analysis  of  these,  even  more  than  that  of 


HINTON'S    LIFE  39 

music,  opened  up  new  ideas  about  morals 
and  life.  It  was  characteristic  of  the  man 
to  send  some  of  his  David  Coxes  to  public- 
houses,  so  that  they  should  be  explained  to 
the  people  there.  His  personal  study  of 
how  a  true  artist  expresses  himself  in  a 
picture  gave  him  the  key  as  to  how  a  man 
who  wanted  to  make  life  an  art  should 
proceed.  He  saw,  through  his  study  of 
pictures,  how  the  growing  artist  works 
through  mere  impulse  into  elaborate  detail, 
and  from  elaborate  detail  into  a  freedom 
which,  through  its  very  width  and  know- 
ledge, can  dispense  with  slavish  adherence 
to  tradition  and  detailed  morality,  using 
these  only  as  almost  unconscious  factors  in 
the  simplicity  of  the  greater  and  stronger 
expression  of  himself. 

To  Hinton,  then,  the  law  was  the  same 
for  both  art  and  life.  First,  impulse, 
then  elaboration  of  detail  and  restraint  of 
impulse,  and  after  that  the  deeper  ex- 
pression where  detail  and  restraint  are  lost 


40       THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

in  the  larger  beauty  of  simplicity  and 
freedom. 

The  life  of  the  animal  is  a  life  completely 
at  one  with  Nature  and  with  impulse,  but 
it  is  a  life  below  morality.  The  restraints  of 
the  conscious  personality  and  the  elaborate 
detail  of  morality  have  no  part  in  the  impulse 
of  the  mere  animal  desires  and  actions.  The 
life  of  the  ordinary  average  man  is  not 
at  one  even  with  Nature.  A  practical 
farmer  may  perhaps  dare  to  assert  that  the 
life  of  the  young  man  about  town  is  not 
nearly  as  sound  and  close  to  Nature  as  the 
clean,  sweet  life  of  a  dog,  a  cow,  or  a  horse. 

Hinton  saw  this  as  a  doctor  as  well  as  a 
mystic.  In  animals,  unless  man  interferes, 
we  get  a  nature  harmony.  In  the  average 
man  and  woman  we  get  impulses  and  con- 
ventions contradicting  one  another.  It  is 
natural  animal  impulse  fighting  with  elabo- 
rate moral  detail  and  conventional  tradition. 
Restraint  and  duty  push  back  impulse,  or 
else  impulse  conquers.     Restraint  and  duty 


HINTON'S   LIFE  41 

often  go  to  the  wall,  and  we  say  of  the 
artist,  in  life  or  in  art,  this  is  failure,  that 
is  disaster.  We  can  all  see  the  conflict  of 
impulse  and  goodness  around  us. 

A  good  person  is  often  dull,  or  cold,  or 
hard,  or  too  elaborate  in  restraint,  and  with 
an  absence  of  delight  in  living.  A  false 
terror  of  impulse  brings  about  an  unreasoned 
sense  of  sin.  Neither  the  person  of  uncon- 
trolled impulses  nor  the  person  of  unnatural 
restraint  can,  as  artist  or  man,  get  to  the 
perfect  simplicity  which  the  good  man  and 
the  real  artist  must  attain  if  they  wish  to 
achieve  true  greatness.  The  fuller  freedom 
has  welded  both  impulse  and  elaboration 
into  an  harmonious  whole,  making  for 
beauty,  simplicity,  and  a  freedom  which 
needs  neither  licence  nor  restraint. 

Now,  what  Hinton  realised  as  beauty  in 
art  he  believed  to  be  possible  in  morals. 
He  stated  that  it  is  possible  for  man  to 
attain  to  a  life  in  which  nature  and  passion 
can  be  at  one  with  goodness.     He  always 


42       THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

felt  goodness  and  impulse  ought  not  to  be 
antagonistic.  Hinton  wanted  men  and 
women  to  live  above  the  law,  not  below  it. 
He  wanted  them  to  live  above  mere  im- 
pulse, and  above  the  elaboration  of  the 
letter  of  morality,  so  that  the  true  spirit  of 
goodness  can  have  a  chance. 

The  highest  life,  according  to  Hinton, 
was  one  in  which  the  impulses  move 
spontaneously  in  the  direction  of  right.  He 
would  have  no  waste  of  healthy,  natural 
human  feelings.  The  history  of  the  indi- 
vidual passes  through  the  irresponsible 
passion  of  the  child,  which  is  almost  as 
unconscious  of  evil  as  in  the  animal.  Later 
the  evil  comes  in,  when  passion  is  pursued 
consciously  or  for  conscious  pleasure  instead 
of  for  unconscious  service.  It  is  just  at  this 
point,  when  pleasure  is  emphasised  and 
service  is  ignored,  that  gluttony  and  lust 
come  in  and  spoil  pleasure  and  service  alike. 
It  is  at  this  stage  that,  in  alarm,  man 
brings  in  restraint,  not  on  his  sweet  natural 


HINTON'S   LIFE  43 

impulses,  but  on  his  gluttony,  and  then  we 
see  what  happens !  He  confounds  the 
gluttony  with  the  impulse,  and  restrains  or 
condemns  the  good  with  the  bad.  We  all 
know  the  process  well  enough.  It  is  all 
around  us,  and  we  are  all  more  or  less 
suffering  from  the  wrong  conception  that 
it  is  asceticism  that  is  good  and  licence 
only  that  is  bad. 

They  are  both  bad,  because  they  are  both 
equally  self-centred,  and  so  equally  dangerous 
to  human  progress.  Asceticism  and  licence 
are  both  enemies  to  the  real  freedom  in 
which  strength  and  purity,  joy  and  exu- 
berance, are  essential  factors.  This  greater 
freedom  which  unites  service  and  pleasure 
is  what  James  Hinton  gave  his  life  to  teach. 

He  was  the  pioneer  of  a  freedom  which 
could  easily  dispense  with  both  licence  and 
restraint.  He  knew  well  enough  that  before 
we  can  really  get  this  freedom  a  law- 
breaker is  essential,  and  by  a  law-breaker 
he  meant  one  who  will  dare  to  break  the 


44      THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

letter  in  order  to  free  the  spirit.  "  I  want 
one  law  for  men  and  women,"  he  said,  "  a 
law  of  the  spirit.  One  law,  the  absolute 
desire  for  good  in  both." 

Why  he  called  himself  a  saviour  of  women 
was  that  he  realised  in  the  relations  of  men 
and  women  more  than  anywhere  else  how 
far  away  from  being  real  artists  we  are. 
Uncontrolled  impulse,  elaboration  of  worldly 
detail,  a  hypocritical  upholding  of  immoral 
so-called  moralities  all  around  us,  all  this  is 
evident  enough  ;  but  what  of  the  simplicity 
and  beauty  of  the  lover  who  has  passed 
beyond  mere  impulse  and  elaborate  restraint 
into  a  perfect  freedom  ?  How  many  of 
these  lovers,  either  among  men  or  women, 
can  any  one  of  us  count  on  our  fingers  ? 

Hinton  believed  absolutely  in  woman,  and 
he  realised  how  hampered  she  is  in  a  society 
which  has  reached  a  certain  high  code  of 
sexual  morality  whose  best  tenets  are  only 
held  by  the  average  man  in  theory.  He 
saw   clearly    how    the    result    of    this    lip 


HINTON'S    LIFE  45 

morality  reacts  on  every  class  of  woman  in 
the  community.  It  affects  the  class  the 
average  man  monopolises  and  enervates,  and 
the  class  he  prostitutes  and  despises. 

Intense  suffering  is  the  lot  of  both  the 
pampered  and  the  prostituted.  Both  are  in 
chains  and  are  to  be  equally  pitied.  Hinton 
saw  this  as  a  doctor,  as  a  very  human 
person,  and  above  all  as  a  social  reformer 
and  as  a  truly  unselfish  man. 

"  I  think  of  him  pre-eminently,"  said  one  of  his 
most  intimate  friends,  "  as  the  one  man  I  have 
known  who  never  tolerated  selfishness  or  self-regard 
in  any  shape  or  under  any  disguise,  who  hunted 
them  pitilessly  out  of  every  corner  in  life.  Each 
thing  is  to  be  put  aside  as  soon  as  it  grows  into 
a  self  form.1' 

James  Hinton's  conclusions  about  social 
reform,  especially  with  regard  to  women, 
are  open  to  question,  but  his  motives  were 
absolutely  pure  and  simple.  Whether  pas- 
sion should  be  made  a  basis  of  ethics  is,  of 
course,  open  to  discussion,  and  his  gospel 


46      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

of  "  others'  needs,"  wants  more  explanation 
than  we  have  had  as  yet  from  his  inter- 
preters. To  the  very  last  Hinton  did  not 
know  the  world.  He  had  neither  the  good 
nor  the  bad  qualities  of  the  real  man  of 
the  world.  He  was  Nature's  child,  and  his 
visions  and  ideals  were  not  those  of  the 
drawing-room,  but  of  the  heavens  ;  and  yet, 
fixed  as  his  vision  was  on  a  star,  his  im- 
pulsive, earth-bound  nature  was  as  much 
torn  and  tossed,  to  the  very  end,  as  the 
villa-bound,  strenuous,  and  perplexed  seekers 
for  truth  who  listened  to  his  gospel. 

Hinton  was  always  open  to  the  conviction 
that  a  newer  vision  might  come  to  him  at 
any  time  and  modify  or  intensify  the  old 
one.  The  conception  of  truth,  not  Truth 
itself,  he  knew  to  be  a  fluid  and  not  a  rigid 
thing.  As  he  characteristically  said  once, 
"My  notions,  though  rather  clever,  may  be 
the  merest  moonshine,  no  more  likely  to  be 
true  than  that  cats  should  walk  on  their 
tails." 


HINTON'S   LIFE  47 

He  taught,  and  truly,  that  right  is  only 
a  rigid  thing  when  you  are  acting  for  self, 
and  a  fluid  thing  if  acting  for  others.  For 
instance,  a  man  to  whom  keeping  the 
Sabbath  is  a  rigid  thing  will  not  only  do 
no  manner  of  work  in  a  technical  sense 
on  Sunday,  but  he  will  refuse  to  save  his 
neighbour's  ox  from  death.  He  is  bound 
by  a  rigid  code  which  fossilises  his  impulses 
to  good  and  limits  his  service  powers. 
Hi  n ton  saw  very  clearly  that  we  have 
made  our  morals  consist  in  shutting  our 
eyes  to  the  relations  of  things.  It  will  take 
a  long  time  to  supplant  our  traditionalised 
conception  of  morals  by  true  morals. 
Hinton  said  it  would  take  three  genera- 
tions, and  he  wisely  held  that  we  must 
begin  with  the  children. 

The  people  who  follow  in  any  degree  their 
own  inner  vision  of  a  new  order  of  morality 
suffer  from  petty  inquisition  and  social 
ostracism.  The  fear  of  this  makes  many 
good  men  and  women  cowards,  and  so  a  big 

4 


48      THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

human  good  is  delayed.  We  must  neither 
be  cowards  nor  restless  ;  but,  above  all,  we 
must  not  be  cowards.  Hinton  died  before 
his  time  because  the  fight  was  too  much 
for  him.  He,  was  no  coward,  but  he  had 
strained  his  nervous  strength  beyond  its 
power  of  resistance,  and  he  had  not,  even  as 
a  seer,  the  deeper  knowledge  which  makes 
us  work  without  haste  as  well  as  without 
rest.  Sympathy  from  without,  and  deeper 
understanding  of  his  vision  from  within, 
might  have  helped  him.  Serenity  and  more 
faith  certainly  would  have  saved  him  much 
of  his  mental  suffering  at  the  last.  To  be 
the  slayer  or  the  slain  in  these  great 
matters  implies  a  lack  of  equipoise.  We 
must  never  force  the  vision,  but  if  it  comes, 
either  to  us  or  through  us,  we  must  accept 
it.  Nor  let  us  crush  the  heart  and  soul  out 
of  one  who  has  not  only  seen,  but  pro- 
claimed, a  new  truth.  To  come  out  of  our 
rigidity  and  cease  condemning  is  the  first 
law  of  the  spiritual  life.     Let  us  open  our 


HINTON'S   LIFE  49 

eyes  to  all  good,  and  be  tender  over  all 
limitations  but  our  own.  Condemnation, 
or  pulling  down,  is  the  dull  thing.  Our 
work  is  to  build  up. 

Hinton's  morals  go  beyond  the  dictum 
which  says,  "  Live  for  self,"  and  also  beyond 
that  which  says,  "  Live  for  others."  He 
would  say,  "  Give  a  true,  joyous,  natural 
response  to  every  claim,  whether  of  self  or 
others."  This  can  only  be  done  by  wise  steer- 
ing between  asceticism  or  restraint,  and  excess 
or  self-indulgence.  In  order  to  live  out  this 
ideal  of  James  Hinton's  we  should  have  to 
look  upon  ourselves,  and  others,  as  a  means 
to  an  end,  and,  therefore,  the  means  must  be 
cared  for  and  fulfilled  because  of  the  end. 
His  great  cry,  then,  is  not  "  for  myself  and 
others,"  but,  "myself  in  and  for  others." 
This  idea  touches  vital  questions  of  appetites 
and  desires,  and  also  of  human  service,  and 
it  is  with  his  suggestions  on  these  matters 
that  the  three  following  chapters  will  be 
concerned. 


50      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

Every  fighter  for  freedom  and  truth  will 
echo  Hinton's  own  words  : 

"  I  am,"  he  says,  "  like  a  man  climbing  a  mountain. 
Every  limb  strained  to  the  utmost,  every  nerve  tense  ; 
and  he  or  she  who  would  be  with  me  must  accept 
life  so,  must  climb  the  mountain  or  be  content  to 
keep  upon  the  plain.  They  must  accept  the  strain, 
the  effort.  They  must  face,  closing  their  eyes  even 
that  they  may  not  see,  the  precipices  with  sheer 
death  at  the  bottom  of  them — the  pathless  rocks 
that  mock  all  thought  of  progress.  They  must 
breathe  that  thin,  keen  air,  and  be  content  to  walk  on 
ice,  where  each  footstep  is  a  slip,  and  would  be  a  fall, 
but  that  it  enables  us  to  take  the  next.11 


CHAPTER    II 

JAMES    HINTON'S    ETHICS 


CHAPTER    II 

JAMES    HINTON'S   ETHICS 

Hinton's  personal  characteristics— A  forerunner  of 
Nietzsche  and  Carpenter  —  Affinities  of  genius 
with  weakness— Nature  and  morality— Physical 
and  spiritual  worlds  one— Hinton's  "  dangerous 
views  "—Monogamy  and  polygamy— Asceticism 
and  excess— Hinton's  conception  of  true  sexual 
freedom. 

Though  James  Hinton  died  in  1875,  yet 
to-day  one  rarely  meets  with  any  one  who 
has  the  least  idea  of  his  methods  or  of 
himself.  Some  only  know  of  him  as  a 
celebrated  aurist,  others  confuse  him  with 
his  son  and  speak  vaguely  of  him  as  one 
who  had  wrestled  with  the  fourth  dimension.1 

1  His  son  C.  H.  Hintoiij  who  died  in  1907,  edited  some 
of  his  father's  writings  under  the  title  of  The  Art  of  Thinking 
(1879);  and  was  known  by  his  varied  and  interesting  essays 
and  romances  bearing  on  the  fourth  dimension.  His  chief 
books  are :  Scientific  Romances  (1884-96)  ;  A  New  Era  of 
Thought  (1888)  ;  Stella  :  Studies  of  the  Unseen  (1895) ;  The 
Fourth  Dimension  (1904) ;  An  Episode  of  Flatland  (1907). 

53 


54       THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

Some  few,  with  nervous  hesitation,  inquire 
whether  he  was  not  an  ardent  advocate 
of  polygamy  and  whether  he  committed 
suicide.  Those  whose  interest  has  been 
stirred  read  the  Life  and  Letters  of  James 
Hinton,  by  Ellice  Hopkins,  and  come  to 
the  conclusion  that  Hinton  was  a  disguised 
missionary  with  a  leaning  towards  free  love. 
A  few  consider  him  as  one  who  dealt 
with  obscure  metaphysical  problems  of  no 
general  interest.  These  ideas  are  either 
exaggerations  or  misconceptions.  Accord- 
ing to  Mrs.  Hinton,  the  life  edited  by  Miss 
Hopkins  only  contains  what  was  credible. 

If,  his  wife  declared,  all  could  be  put 
down  about  this  profound  thinker  it  would 
not  be  believed.  Miss  Hopkins  only  knew 
James  Hinton  for  two  years  before  he  died, 
and  she  had  imbibed  from  his  teachings 
only  what  belonged  to  her  own  conception 
of  things.  She  edited  his  letters  at  a  time 
when  it  was  unadvisable  from  a  worldly 
point  of  view  to  tell  the  truth  either  about 


HINTONS   ETHICS  55 

the  man  or  his  message.  Compromise  and 
expediency  about  a  great  man  always  leave 
little  men  in  the  dark  about  him.  Hinton 
was  a  great  and  good  man,  though  not  a 
goody-goody  man. 

Hinton  once  said  to  his  wife,  "  People 
will  say  when  I  am  dead  that  I  was  such 
a  good  man.  Will  you  always  say  that  I 
was  not  ?  You  know  that  I  am  not." 
"  You  are  a  darling  !  "  emphatically  declared 
Mrs.  Hinton. 

In  a  letter  to  Caroline  Haddon,  again,  he 
says : 

"  I  have  seen  so  simply  and  clearly  that  I  am  one 
of  the  '  bad '  people.  Their  nature  is  my  nature.  I 
am  not  unlike  other  men,  only  unlike  those  I  have 
been  falsely  put  amongst.  I  see,  too,  more  plainly 
how  I  am  unlike  and  apart  from  the  good.  Their 
luxury  I  always  loathed,  but  now  I  see  that  I  loathe 
their  restraints  too." 

Such  statements  about  himself  as  these 
may  account  for  some  of  the  ideas  that  are 
afloat  about  James  Hinton.     The  world  is 


56      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

curiously  willing  to  take  us  at  our  own 
estimate,  and  the  man  who  rashly  declares 
himself  to  be  bad  is  readily  believed, 
especially  if  he  has  an  unfashionable  and 
unconventional  truth  to  deliver.  Hinton 
had  the  courage  to  say,  to  do,  and  to  face 
things  which  in  his  day  scared  and  be- 
wildered the  truth-seekers  more  than  they 
stimulated  them. 

He  saw  how  we  all  try  to  bind  giants 
with  cobwebs,  so  he  endeavoured  to  clear 
away  some  of  the  cobwebs  in  his  own  soul 
and  face  the  giants.  He  once  caught  him- 
self, in  a  fit  of  absent-mindedness,  writing  a 
prescription  for  an  ointment  to  "  rub  round 
the  world."  It  was  characteristic  of  the  man. 
James  Hinton  had  intense  vitality,  immense 
emotional  force,  great  love  of  scientific 
research,  a  reverent  worship  of  and  belief 
in  Nature,  an  overwhelming  incontinence  of 
speech,  and  a  child-like  belief  that  his  views 
would  be  accepted  and  co-ordinated  by  those 
to  whom  he  turned  for  understanding.     In 


HINTON'S   ETHICS  57 

spite  of  each  failure  he  believed  the  next 
kindred  spirit  would  comprehend  and  balance 
what  he  really  meant,  but  as  a  rule  it 
happened  that  one  more  terrified  truth- 
seeker  flew  to  the  herd  to  be  reassured. 

Hinton  had  a  nature  at  once  mystical  and 
scientific.  He  was  the  modern  forerunner 
of  this  apparently  incongruous  marriage  of 
which  we  cannot  as  yet  know  the  issue. 
Hinton  was  as  emotional  and  receptive  as  a 
woman,  while  remaining  intellectually  crea- 
tive and  virile  as  a  man.  When  a  friend 
said  to  Hinton's  mother  that  he  had  some- 
thing of  the  woman  in  him,  she  replied, 
"You  could  not  pay  me  a  higher  compliment. 
I  desire  nothing  better  for  my  sons  than 
that  they  should  have  something  of  the 
woman  in  them.     Jesus  Christ  had." 

James  Hinton  is  very  much  judged 
through  his  immature  work  or  his  very  ex- 
travagant outbursts,  so  that  it  is  desirable 
to  dwell,  in  this  chapter,  on  his  real  sanity 
and  suggestiveness.     A  few  women,  out  of 


58       THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

a  hurt  vanity  or  a  misapprehension  of  his 
meaning,  have  called  him  bad  names ;  but 
the  insinuation  merely  indicates  their  want 
of  humour,  of  intellect,  or  of  self-respect. 
There  are  women  still  living,  and  notably 
two  who  are  no  longer  with  us — Hinton's 
wife  and  her  sister  Caroline  Haddon — whose 
whole  attitude  to  finiteness  and  infiniteness 
has  borne  the  mark  of  his  individuality  and 
goodness. 

When  I  last  saw  Caroline  Haddon,  a 
few  years  before  her  death,  blind  and  eaten 
up  with  gout  and  its  kindred  pains,  I  felt 
that  one  need  never  worry  about  what 
happens,  but  only  as  to  how  we  take  what 
happens.  Intellectually  as  keen  as  ever, 
full  of  interest  in  this  world  and  the  next, 
lying  sightless  and  helpless,  with  a  serenity 
which  baffled  all  mere  speculation,  I  suddenly 
realised  as  I  talked  to  her  that  she  was  a 
better  testimony  to  the  worth  of  James 
Hinton  than  the  ablest  book  that  could  be 
written  about  him.     He  was  the  great  in- 


HINTON'S   ETHICS  59 

fluence  of  her  life,  and  she  was  a  very  brave 
and  a  very  good  woman.  Those  who  love 
us,  educate  us,  it  has  been  well  said,  and 
only  those  who  love  us,  know  us.  It  is 
always  well  to  draw  near  to  the  inner  heart 
of  those  for  whom  the  crowd  has  stupid 
names  and  a  few  people  whole-hearted  de- 
votion. The  so-called  dangerous  lunatics, 
free-lovers,  the  despised  and  rejected  of  men, 
have  generally  a  true  word  for  those  who 
will  listen  and  understand.  Even  if  these 
people  can  be  proved  cracked,  there  is 
always,  as  Maudsley  declared  once,  a  possi- 
bility, in  this  way,  of  letting  the  light 
through  the  crevices. 

James  Hinton  was  curiously  the  fore- 
runner of  men  like  Nietzsche  and  Edward 
Carpenter.  What  they  have  co-ordinated 
Hinton  suggested.  His  books  are  full  of 
beautiful  and  inspiring  things,  but,  busy  man 
as  he  was,  he  never  had  time  to  develop 
his  theories  into  a  coherent  whole. 

Ellice  Hopkins,  in  her  book,  has  presented 


60       THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

us  with  a  sketch  rather  than  a  finished 
portrait.  Hinton  was  not  only  "  a  clean- 
minded  man  with  brains,"  as  some  one  once 
said  of  him,  but  he  was  a  courageous  solver 
of  extremely  difficult  problems,  which  few 
of  us  have  the  sincerity  or  decency  even 
yet  to  face.  He  had  no  wish  to  pose 
either  as  a  saint  or  a  sinner,  though  there 
is  a  suggestion  of  both  in  the  man  and  his 
work.  He  was  a  human,  direct,  and  impres- 
sionable genius.  He  was  indeed  more  a 
man  of  genius  than  a  man  of  talent,  and 
his  conception  of  what  genius  means  is  a 
help  to  the  understanding  of  himself  with 
his  paradoxes,  inconsistencies,  and  weak- 
nesses. 

"  So  far  from  genius,'"  he  says,  "  being  greatness 
and  imitating  power,  it  is  emphatically  the  reverse. 
The  men  of  talent  are  the  men  of  power :  they  are  the 
strong.     The  affinities  of  genius  are  with  weakness.'" 

In  the  book  of  extracts  from  his  manu- 
scripts called  Philosophy  and  Religion,  he 
says,  "  Talent  is  doing ;  genius  is  suffering." 


HINTONS   ETHICS  61 

Man's  work  is  done  not  by  doing,  but  by 
suffering.  It  is  by  what  we  bear  that  the 
world  is  redeemed.  Our  doing  is  very 
unimportant  in  itself,  it  is  of  no  value. 
Christ  was  a  sufferer,  not  a  doer.1 

Hinton  was  a  lovable,  big-souled  creature, 
who  could  rarely  be  got  to  a  dinner-party 
or  to  have  his  hair  cut  or  his  photograph 
taken,  and  yet  he  dared  to  look  Nature 
right  in  the  face  and  contrast  man's  puny 
laws  with  her  vast  demands.  He  came  to 
look  at  moral  nature  with  eyes  trained 
through  looking  at  physical  nature.    "  Nature 

1  "  Looking  at  a  portrait  of  Beethoven,"  wrote  Hinton, 
"  it  was  evident  that  it  had  in  it  the  face  of  an  animal  ;  it 
was  plainly  the  face  of  an  animal  combined  with  that  of 
a  man.  And  this  reveals  genius  again.  Genius  is  a  cross 
between  animal  and  man,  both  are  in  it ;  it  is  an  animal  com- 
bined with  a  man.  .  .  .  This  indicates  perfectuess  in  being  one 
with  Nature  ;  here  is  genius  getting  closer  to  her  again. 
The  gift  of  genius  is  simply  that  it  cannot  keep  Nature — 
the  sensuous  element  of  Nature — out.  ...  Of  course  the 
world  shall  have  its  genius-period.  That  will  be  the  age 
of  the  integrated  Greek.  Man  is  genius,  and  his  life  is  the 
genius-life  ;  he  accomplishes  ends  unforeseen  and  does  by 
instinct  what  he  could  not  do  by  trying." — The  Lawbreaker 
pp.  150,  205. 


62       THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

is  the  bride  of  the  soul,"  he   says.     "  Not 
wedded  yet,  indeed,  but  to  be  wedded." 

James  Hinton  is  not  a  constructor  of  a 
system  or  systems.  He  is  a  suggester  of 
right  moral  values.  A  man  will  approve 
or  condemn  Hinton  as  he  himself  is  in 
harmony  or  antagonism  with  the  things 
around  him.  A  mere  conventionalist  or  a 
rigid  Puritan  will  have  none  of  him.  He 
is,  to  use  Whitman's  phrase,  "  too  fluid  and 
too  chaste."  It  takes  a  good  deal  of  human 
love  and  understanding  to  get  a  just  estimate 
of  the  curious  combination  of  arrogance  and 
humility  which  are  characteristic  of  this 
man.  Morality  to  Hinton  was  not  a  mere 
matter  of  goodness  but  of  true  relation 
to  facts,  a  relation  which  must,  of  the 
necessity  of  things,  be  fluent  and  cannot 
be  rigid. 

"  If  you  make  right  a  rigid  thing,"  he  says,  "  a  rigid 
thing  in  man's  life  is  precisely  as  a  dead  thing  in 
a  living  body.  It  cannot  partake  in  the  life,  and 
so  is  disease.11 


HINTON'S   ETHICS  63 

In  The  Lawbreaker  he  says  briefly  that 
laws,  duties,  virtues,  and  fixed  rights  and 
wrongs  are  apt  to  become  obsolete  and  dead 
and  so  very  harmful  to  the  living  organism. 
In  Philosophy  and  Religion  he  says : 

"  The  idea  that  that  only  which  is  bad  needs  to  be 
reformed,  superseded,  or  done  away  with,  is  perhaps 
the  greatest  hindrance  to  our  progress.  We  must 
learn  to  see  that  everything,  the  good  and  necessary, 
just  as  much  as  any  other,  requires  to  be  reformed 
and  superseded  by  the  opposite  when  it  has  had 
its  day." 

Hinton  realised  that  there  is  not,  there 
cannot  be,  an  absolute  morality  binding  on 
all  and  for  ever.  He  points  us  again  and 
again  to  Nature,  where  we  find  no  fixed 
thing,  always  a  giving  place.  Nature  is 
always  destroying  and  rebuilding,  and  Hinton 
believes  morality  must  be  akin  to  this  same 
process.  We  must  keep  clean,  clear,  and 
courageous  minds,  in  order  to  be  true  and 
wholesome,  knowing  that  what  has  once 
been    good    and    useful    may    later    be    a 

5 


64       THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

hindrance.  The  insincerity  and  cowardice 
of  holding  to  a  good  thing  which  has  be- 
come bad  for  us  is  always  a  bar  to  the  new 
and  necessary  vision.  Hinton  said  once  to 
his  wife  :  "  If  my  ideas  are  false,  then  the 
truth  must  be  something  better,  and  I  am 
glad."  He  was  always  ready  for  the  newer 
and  better  stage,  even  at  the  expense  of  his 
consistency. 

In  a  short  study  it  is  impossible  to  give 
even  a  superficial  idea  of  what  a  great 
thinker  suggests  to  us,  but  it  is  imperative 
to  take  briefly  a  few  points  in  Hinton 's 
life  and  philosophy  which,  at  any  rate,  may 
help  to  clear  up  some  of  the  mistaken  ideas 
most  people  have  of  the  man  and  his 
teaching. 

Nature  to  Hinton  was  no  step-mother. 
From  her  breasts  he  believed  we  could 
safely  take  our  life  and  so  grow  strong  to 
understand  how  to  live.  In  1851,  even 
before  his  marriage,  he  wrote,  "  I  never  yet 
laid  my  hand  with  a  resolute  heart  upon  any 


HINTON'S   ETHICS  65 

portion  of  God's  universe  that  I  could  reach 
that  did  not  turn  to  gold  beneath  my  grasp  "  ; 
and  this  is  the  attitude  of  Hinton  to  Nature. 
His  Life  in  Nature  makes  one  feel  that 
the  true  law  of  Nature  should  combine  abso- 
lute Tightness  with  perfect  delight.  We 
have  only  to  be  sincere  with  ourselves  to 
realise  that  some  of  our  laws  certainly  rob  us 
of  this  combination  of  perfect  delight  and 
absolute  Tightness,  and  so  they  cheat  us  of 
our  goodly  heritage.  Impulses  should  move 
in  the  direction  of  right,  and  right  to  Hinton 
in  these  matters  was  a  splendid  combination 
of  the  liberty  and  unselfconsciousness  of  the 
animal  with  the  educated  conscience  and 
consciousness  of  the  man  or  the  over-man. 
Nature,  to  Hinton,  is  God  carrying  out  His 
ideal,  the  passion  of  the  Supreme  Artist  for 
expression,  and  he  grows  impatient  with  the 
conventional  dauber  who  thinks  he  knows 
how  to  paint  better  than  God. 

"  Nature,"  he  says  in  his  Philosophy  and  Religion, 
"  has   no    secrets   which  she  hides  from   him    who 


66      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

knows  that  she  is  holiness,  no  love  that  she  withholds 
from  him  who  loves  the  holy."  "  All  our  mental 
life,"  he  says  in  the  same  book,  "  comes  from  obser- 
vation of  Nature." 

Hinton  realised  that  people  are  just  as 
afraid  of  following  Nature  as  they  are  afraid 
of  looking  straight  into  their  own  souls.  He 
tells  us  there  is  nothing  to  be  afraid  of  in 
Nature,  nothing  to  be  afraid  of  in  our  own 
hearts  or  in  the  hearts  of  others.  The  thing 
to  fear  is  Cant,  which  hides  the  deep  thing. 
It  is  surely  better  to  be  a  natural  devil  than 
an  artificial  saint.  Nature  will  cut  the 
devilish  traces  away  from  us  later  if  we  are 
true  to  ourselves.  Kipling's  Satan  might 
well  refuse  his  good  hell  coal  to  burn  us  if 
we  consciously  recede  from  a  big  ideal  for  a 
worldly  advantage  or  a  love  of  being  com- 
fortable. 

In  his  Art  of  Thinking,  Hinton  says  : 

"  Instead  of  believing  that  we  are  in  two  worlds, 
as  all  religious  men  affirm,  we  shall  think  we  are  in 
a  world  apprehended  by  two  faculties.  The  physical 
world  will  become  to  our  regard  no  more  a  distinct 


HINTONS   ETHICS  67 

existence  opposed  to  the  spiritual,  but  that  spiritual 
itself." 

In  The  Lawbreaker  he  is  very  definite. 

"  If  the  Holy  Ghost  in  Christ's  mouth  meant 
Nature,  the  unpardonable  sin  is  clear.  .  .  .  '  It  does 
not  matter  how  you  regard  Me  or  what  you  say  of 
Me,1  says  Christ.  '  I  shall  not  mind.  You  will  be 
forgiven.  But  if  you  contradict  and  will  not  be 
guided  by  her,  how  can  good  come  to  you  ?  There 
is  never  any  forgiveness  for  that.  Who  can  forgive 
you  ?  Can  you  get  to  a  mountain's  top  by  walking 
down  it?'" 

What  was  it,  Hinton  asks,  that  showed 
Christ  that  the  true  law  was  not  a  law  of 
things,  and  so  must  be  from  the  heart  ?  It 
was  in  Nature  that  he  saw  it.  It  was  the 
feeling  of  her  selfless  freedom.  He  saw  God 
made  the  sun  to  rise  on  the  evil  and  on  the 
good,  and  so  he  did  not  condemn  the  sinner. 
"  Man  is  not  above  nature,"  Hinton  says, 
"but  below  her  as  yet."  In  The  Law- 
breaker he  emphatically  declares  that 

"  man  is  to  be  one  with  Nature,  which  is  simply  to 
take  her  law.     It  is  all  ready.     We  have  misappre- 


68       THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

hended  what  being  one  with  Nature  is.  It  does  not 
need  any  change  of  our  condition.  It  is  a  thing  now 
for  us  to  choose.11 

"  I  perceive,11  he  says,  "  that  one  thing  I  propose 
to  do  is  to  match  the  Fatherhood  of  God  with  the 
Motherhood  of  Nature,  and,  as  in  a  child's  earliest 
years  the  mother's  part  is  the  most  important,  may 
it  not  be  that  as  yet  it  is  also  for  man,  and  that 
he  would  have  done  well  to  have  thought  relatively 
more  about  his  mother  ?  He  has  had  too  much  to 
imagine  his  Father.11 

Hinton  declares  that  the  true  channels  of 
man's  life  are  blocked  up.  We  are  suffering 
under  the  effects  of  that  throughout.  And 
one  chief  remedy  is  to  open  them,  according 
to  God  and  Nature.  Then  the  effects  of  the 
stoppage  will  cease  and  the  course  is  clear. 
Wrong  within  makes  evil  what  is  good,  and 
then  life  is  blocked.  Hinton  tells  us  clearly- 
enough  that  the  material  read  in  its  true 
significance  is  the  spiritual,  and  we  may  go 
to  our  Mother  Nature  without  fear. 

"  The  simplicity  of  Nature's  working  is  too  pro- 
found  for   man's    imagination  to    fathom,   and   is 


HINTON'S   ETHICS  69 

revealed  only  to  humble  seeking  and  steadfast  self- 
control,"  says  Hinton. 

He   asks   a    pertinent    enough  question  in 
one  of  his  manuscripts  : 

"  May  not  very  many,  or  even  most  of  what  are 
called  sins,  be  not  really  sins  at  all,  but  merely 
confused  expressions  of  Nature's  claims  for  a  truer 
order  ?  " 

James  Hinton's  attitude  to  pain  is  a  very 
usual  one  to-day,  but  was  not  much  under- 
stood when  he  wrote  his  little  book  called 
The  Mystery  of  Pain.  The  whole  idea — as 
indeed  it  is  Carpenter's  idea  and  Nietzsche's, 
too — is  that  many  things  that  may  seem 
to  be  very  bad  may  truly  be  very  good,  and 
may  be  among  the  best  things  that  can  pos- 
sibly be.  It  is  the  attitude  of  a  man  who 
believes  that  misery  and  sorrow  should  be 
borne,  not  by  each  one  only  for  himself,  but 
by  each  for  another  as  serving  others  in 
some  unseen  way.  When  Dante's  Beatrice 
went  to  her  high  heaven,  Dante  only  then 


70      THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

began  to  be  of  service  to  the  world.  His 
personal  loss  was  just  so  much  gain  to  the 
world. 

In  The  Art  of  Thinking,  he  says  on  this 
point : 

"There  are  materials,  then,  evidently  within  us 
for  an  entire  change  of  our  thoughts  respecting  pain. 
The  world  in  this  respect,  we  might  almost  feel, 
seems  to  tremble  in  the  balance.  A  touch  might 
transform  it  wholly.  One  flash  of  light  from  the 
Unseen,  one  word  spoken  by  God,  might  suffice  to 
make  the  dark  places  bright,  and  wrap  the  sorrow- 
stricken  heart  of  man  in  the  wonder  of  an  unutterable 
glory.  If  all  pain  might  be  seen  in  the  light  of 
martyrdom,  if  the  least  and  lowest  in  man's  puny 
life,  or  shall  we  say  rather  in  God^  great  universe, 
might  be  interpreted  by  its  best  and  highest,  were 
not  the  work  done?  It  is  done,  for  the  light  has 
shone,  the  word  is  spoken."" 

The  good  that  is  being  worked  out  in 
man  is  not  within  our  view,  according  to 
Hinton.  The  regeneration  of  our  nature 
involves  the  loss  of  much  that  seems  very- 
good   to   us,  much   that   could   satisfy   us. 


HINTON'S   ETHICS  71 

We   have   to   bear  suffering  by  faith,  but 

with  such  a  good  hope  that  sooner  or  later 

we  accept  it  as  we  accept  the  sufferings  of 

love,  joyfully    and    understandingly.      The 

great  secret  is  not  to  try  even  to  get  rid 

of  suffering,  but  to  hold  to  it  while  we  get 

rid  of  that  in  it  which  makes  it  bad.     In  his 

Life  in  Nature,  he  says  : 

"  All  storing  up  of  force  is  a  nutrition,  all 
liberation  of  it  is  the  effecting  of  a  function.  For 
it  is  not  in  the  material  alone  that  this  law  has  its 
place.  It  extends  as  widely  and  soars  as  high  as 
life.  It  is  the  key  above  all  to  our  own.  All  strife 
and  failure,  all  subjection,  baffling,  wrong,  these 
are  nutrition ;  they  are  instruments  of  life,  the 
prophecies  of  its  perfect  ends.  They  store  up  the 
power,  they  make  the  organisation,  and  where  these 
are,  the  function  shall  not  fail.  Life  is  in  that  which 
we  call  failure,  which  we  feel  as  loss,  which  throws 
us  back  upon  ourselves  in  anguish,  which  crushes  us 
with  despair.  It  is  in  aspirations  baffled,  hopes 
destroyed,  efforts  that  win  no  goal.  It  is  in  the 
cross  taken  up.  The  silent  flowers,  the  lilies  of  the 
field,  teach  us  the  lesson  too.  Nature  takes  up  her 
cross,  loses  her  life  to  gain  it.  The  fertilised  seed 
grows  as  it  decays." 


72      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

Hinton  knew  there  was  no  failure  any- 
where ;  if  it  is  anywhere,  it  is  in  not  striving. 
The  failure,  as  he  says  again  and  again,  is 
phenomenon,  not  fact ;  simply  that  which 
we  feel  because  we  feel  wrongly  and  know 
not  that  which  is.  While  we  go  mourning, 
the  heavens  clap  their  hands  and  earth 
rejoices,  Nature  palpitates  through  every 
nerve  with  infinite  joy.  To  know  is  to  be 
glad.  In  Man  and  his  Dwelling-Place  he 
says : 

"  There  is  not  a  physical  world  and  a  spiritual 
world  besides,  but  the  spiritual  world  which  alone  is, 
is  physical  to  man ;  the  physical  being  the  mode  by 
which  man  in  his  defectiveness  sees  the  spiritual. 
We  feel  a  physical  world  could  be,  but  that  which 
is,  is  the  spiritual  world." 

Hinton  declares  that  to  be  death  which 
makes  man  fear  suffering  more  than  sin- 
ning. In  Man  and  his  Dwelling-Placc,  he 
says  again  : 

"  It  is  not  the  things  we  have  to  bear  that  crush 
and  ruin  us  :  it  is  our  necessity  to  get,  our  want  of 


HINTONS   ETHICS  73 

something  for  ourselves,  our  constant  craving.  That 
is  our  perdition.  Our  hearts  are  taken  captive 
utterly  by  love.  The  terrors  that  have  haunted  us, 
the  evils  we  have  shunned,  were  but  dark  shadows 
from  the  blackness  in  ourselves.  We  look  abroad 
again,  and  the  light  of  heaven  flows  unchequered  over 
all.  Our  fears  are  gone.  If  there  be  no  evil  but 
that  which  love  makes  necessary,  then  there  is  no 
evil.  If  no  pain  but  pain  borne  for  man's  life,  then 
is  pain  utterly  transformed.  The  one  love,  that  is 
in  and  through  all  things,  by  which  all  things  are, 
the  love  that  is  the  only  joy,  smiles  also  through  the 
tears  of  sorrow.  Life  stands  confessed  beneath  the 
mask  of  death." 

It  is  not  possible  to  give  even  a  brief 
sketch  of  Hinton's  philosophy  without 
touching  upon  those  questions  he  was  most 
interested  in  during  the  last  five  years  of  his 
life  and  on  which  he  has  left  such  perplexing 
and  yet  interesting  material. 

Hinton  once  rashly  said  of  himself  that 
he  was  a  born  polygamist.  The  stupid 
people  who  heard  him  say  this  ran  off  to 
chatter  it  over  with  the  snakes,  sheep,  and 
parrots   who   are   ever    in    our    midst.     If 


74       THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

Hinton  was  a  born  polygamist  he  believed 
in  monogamy,  but  not  a  monogamy  which 
is  a  disguised  polygamy.  I  have  it  upon 
the  sacred  word  of  both  the  living  and  the 
dead  that  James  Hinton  was,  in  the  only 
real  sense  of  the  word,  a  monogamist. 
Whether  this  is  a  consolation  or  a  mere 
puzzle  to  his  misinterpreters  I  have  not  as 
yet  been  able  to  determine.  INI  any  of  us 
enjoy  giving  a  dog  a  bad  name,  but  we  get 
considerably  worried  when  the  bad  dog  is 
proved  to  be  only  a  good  watch-dog  after 
all,  and  a  defender  of  our  most  valued 
possessions.  Hinton  got  a  bad  name,  chiefly 
because  he  was  a  very  honest  and  a  very 
good  man  misunderstood  by  the  common- 
place and  traditionalised  people  by  whom 
he  was  surrounded.  He  was  a  man  who 
loved  his  wife  first,  last,  and  best  of  all 
women.  But  he  was  an  analyst,  a  scientist, 
a  prober  into  very  subtle  needs,  a  lover  of 
and  a  believer  in  women.  He  was  a  man 
whose  incontinence  of  speech  led  him  into 


HINTONS   ETHICS  75 

many  difficulties  of  action,  and  whose 
chivalrous  nature  made  him  take  the 
burdens  of  others  on  his  shoulders  when 
often  he  had  had  no  part  in  the  making 
of  them. 

Why  his  name  is  associated  with 
"  dangerous "  problems  in  sex  matters  is 
because  he  declares  that  anything  is  better, 
in  these  things,  than  "  those  vile  laws  that 
make  man  a  beast  and  crush  woman  to 
hell."  Hinton  never  wished  to  get  rid  of 
monogamy.  He  knew,  well  enough,  it 
would  be  time  to  talk  about  getting  rid  of 
monogamy  when  we  have  got  it,  not  as  a 
lip  morality  but  as  an  actual  fact.  Most  of 
us  want  monogamy,  but  a  few  of  us  do  not 
want  the  sham  thing  any  more.  Many 
good  people  mistake  this  demand  for  a 
real  monogamy  in  place  of  legalised  licence 
as  a  plea  for  excess  and  laxity,  the  two 
deadliest  and  dullest  things  in  all  the 
world. 

Love,  as  Hinton  viewed  it,  that  is,  a  love 


76       THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

of  the  body  and  the  spirit,  is  the  highest 
thing  we  know  of  yet.  We  are  so  absorbed 
in  sifting  moralities  and  crudities  in  this 
matter  that  the  mysticism  is  ignored.  We 
too  often  leave  this  trinity  of  body,  soul,  and 
spirit,  which  all  true  love  is,  to  be  hurt  by 
the  harlot  and  the  commercialist,  while  we 
are  intent  on  seeking  God  outside  the  very 
lines  He  has  marked  for  us  to  dwell  within 
while  we  are  in  the  world.  Hinton  could 
have  answered  his  enemies  as  a  great 
preacher  answered  the  indignant  person  who 
said  to  him,  "  What !  do  you  mean  to  say  I 
may  live  as  I  like  ?  "  The  preacher  answered, 
"  Would  to  God  I  could  live  as  I  like,  for 
then  I  would  live  holily."  The  world  says, 
"  You  may  live  for  yourself  according  to  the 
prescribed  methods,  but  there  are  certain 
things  you  may  not  do."  Hinton  says, 
"  You  may  not  live  for  yourself,  but  there 
are  no  things  you  may  not  do  if  love 
and  the  service  of  your  fellows  command 
them."      "  Liberty   is    your    heritage,"    he 


HINTON'S   ETHICS  77 

says    to    man.     "  Then   be   such   that   you 
can  claim  it." 

Asceticism  puts  unnecessary  restraints  on 
natural  passion  beyond  the  needs  of  the 
person  or  the  community.  Excess  swamps 
the  mystic  vision  in  all  true  passion  and 
love.  Hinton  would  free  natural  joy  if  it 
holds  the  law  of  service,  and  by  service  he 
means  the  love  which  cannot  injure. 

"  Nature  has  linked  together  pleasure  and  service," 
he  says.  "  The  self  dissociates  them,  and  in  trying 
to  follow  either  alone  it  assures  its  own  destruction 
in  the  end.  No  goodness  that  is  not  happy  is  good 
enough  for  God.  Man  offers  Hirn  his  difficult 
virtues,  his  mortified  body  and  stifled  affections  as  an 
acceptable  sacrifice  ;  but  God  answers,  '  Who  hath 
required  this  at  your  hand  ? 1  It  is  the  restraint  in 
the  heart  and  not  the  external  law  that  matters." 

What  we  want  is  love  instead  of  lust, 
temperance  instead  of  gluttony,  and  above 
all  we  want  courage  to  carry  out  the  ideal 
we  really  know.  Hinton  asserted  emphati- 
cally that  self- righteousness  inevitably  means 
making  right  consist  in  things  and  purity  a 


78      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

matter  of  the  flesh.    In  The  Art  of  Thinking 
he  said: 

"  The  spiritual  and  the  sensuous  parts  are  not 
engaged  merely  in  strife,  the  best  issue  of  which  is 
the  victory  of  the  higher  over  the  lower.  They  are 
joint  factors  in  a  common  work  to  which  each 
contributes  an  essential  element.  For  the  absence 
of  a  true  regard  makes  the  sensuous  evil,  when  with 
the  desire  fixed  on  good  it  is  not  evil.  And  thus 
the  wrong  state  of  the  soul  expresses  itself  inevitably 
in  a  strife  to  put  away  the  sensuous,  and  the  very 
failure  of  its  effort  constitutes  the  means  by  which, 
in  the  larger  life  of  the  race,  the  false  desires  are 
made  true." 

People  are  always  asking,  he  declares, 
what  good  thing  they  shall  do.  But  it  is 
as  Christ  seems  to  say,  "  Do  not  do  at  all ; 
have  a  feeling." 

The  mystery  of  pleasure  was  to  Hinton  a 
thing  to  be  faced  and  understood  as  much 
as  the  mystery  of  pain. 

"  The  true  religious  teachers  and  deliverers,"  he 
says,  "have  been  simply  those  to  whom  it  was  an 
axiom  that  God  could  not  be  truly  served  in  that 
which  hurt  His  creatures." 


HINTON'S   ETHICS  79 

That  was  enough.  To  put  our  not- 
pleasure  instead  of  another's  good  was 
mocking  instead  of  serving  God.  What 
is  wanted  is  to  see  that  the  cruel  things 
which  we  identify  with  religion  and  purity 
and  have  always  so  identified  and  still  feel 
sacred  are  the  same  as  the  cruel  things 
which  our  forefathers  identified  with  religion 
and  felt  towards  in  the  same  way,  and 
which  we  see  quite  easily  to  have  been  evil 
and  false. 

Always  with  Hinton  a  cardinal  sin  was 
setting  goodness  against  pleasure. 

"The  ascetics  gratified  their  souls  but  crushed 
their  bodies,"  he  says.  "  Now  we  gratify  our  bodies 
but  crush  our  souls.  Life  is  to  gratify  both  soul  and 
body.  That  is,  for  there  to  be  no  reason  for  the  soul 
to  restrain  the  body,  but  to  be  able  to  let  Nature's 
demand  lead  us  wholly,  and  so  each  to  be  more 
perfectly  gratified,  for  neither  is  wholly  gratified 
without  the  other.  It  is  but  a  baulking,  pretended, 
half-accomplished  thing.  Did  the  ascetics  truly 
gratify  their  souls  ?  And  how  far  do  we  truly  attain 
our  sense  gratifications  ?  Much  as  is  sacrificed  in 
each  case,  is  the  thing  sought  truly  gained  ?     What 

6 


80      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

man  has  not  firmly  to  control  his  impulses  or  to  reap 
fruits  of  chagrin  and  emptiness  in  licence.1' 

Be  slaves  to  pleasure,  and  you  must  put 
it  away.  Know  how  to  use  it,  and  it  is 
absolutely  free. 

"  This  is  the  proclamation,"  says  Hinton  ;  "  good 
has  nothing  to  do  with  putting  away  pleasure. 
Come  in,  therefore,  you  pleasure-led  people  and  claim 
goodness  as  your  possession.  If  there  is  any  reason 
in  a  man's  putting  away  pleasure  in  order  to  be  good, 
that  means  evil  in  him  :  let  him  repent.  Let^  him 
repent  and  become  a  new  creature."" 

No  wonder  Hinton  was  misunderstood. 
This  doctrine  of  pleasure  scared  the  anaemic 
spiritualist  and  the  vicious  sensualist  alike, 
and  the  scream  of  the  Puritan  and  the 
Pharisee  has  continued  to  this  hour. 

Not  to  pursue  pleasure  nor  to  put  it 
away,  not  to  deny  passion  but  to  deny  self, 
is  how  Hinton  approaches  the  difficult  pro- 
blems of  marriage  and  prostitution.  His 
great  word  on  the  mystery  of  pleasure  is, 
"  Do  not  get  rid  of  pleasure,  but  hold  that, 


HINTON'S   ETHICS  81 

and  get  rid  of  that  in  it  which  makes  it 
bad."  This  "thing"  is  evil,  we  say.  Not  so, 
but  let  it  be  different.  If  many  bewildered 
and  complex  people  could  realise  Hinton's 
assertion  that  there  are  two  roads  to  doing 
right,  one  consisting  in  putting  away  wrong- 
ness,  the  other  in  diverting  it,  we  should 
not  have  to  put  our  saints  in  monasteries 
and  nunneries,  or  our  Oscar  Wildes  in 
prison  ;  but  saints  and  sinners  would  use 
their  powers  for  service  and  joy,  and  not 
for  selfishness  only,  or  for  self-indulgence 
only. 

"  The  evil,"  says  Hinton,  "  is  not  in  indulging 
passion,  but  in  not  following  good  ;  not  in  putting 
away  indulgence,  but  in  having  no  reason  to  put 
it  away." 

It  is  the  absence  of  the  desire  for  good, 
and  then  indulging  passion,  which  is  the 
misery,  just  as  gluttony  is  eating  food  for 
mere  pleasure  instead  of  with  pleasure,  in 
order  to  make  the  body  strong  for  service. 
Hinton  declares  you  cannot  restrain  passion 


82      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

any  more  than  you  can  hold  up  your  feet 
with  your  arms  without  other  support.  You 
can  only  divert  it  and  use  it,  not  only  for 
self  but  for  others.  In  a  letter  to  Miss 
Haddon,  he  says  truly  : 

"  Woman's  relation  to  man  has  been  mixed  up 
with  the  problem  of  pleasure:  she  has  been  sacrificed 
for  that.  So  long  as  man  either  pursues  or  refuses 
pleasure,  he  does,  and  must,  muddle  his  relations 
with  women,  and  cannot  get  them  right ;  that  is, 
true  to  service.  We  do  not  ask  even  what  woman 
needs,  but  what  suits  us,"  he  says.  "  Those  who 
love  and  honour  her  most  are  even  most  intent  upon 
treating  her  with  that  utter  disregard  and  practical 
cruelty  (for  it  is  so),  intenser,  more  exquisite,  than 
can  be  conceived." 

To  Hinton  the  whole  question  was  one 
of  dynamics.  It  was  a  matter  of  so  much 
force  which  could  be  turned  from  one  channel 
into  another  at  the  will  of  the  holder. 

Hinton  had  much  of  the  inner  vision  of 
the  true  lover : 

"  My  heart  burns,"  he  says,  "  with  indignation 
when  I  hear  people  talk  of  the  folly  and  blindness 


HINTON'S   ETHICS  83 

and  exaggeration  of  love.  In  truth,  all  except  those 
who  are  in  love  are  ignorant.  It  is  a  telescope  given 
us,  just  for  once,  by  God,  to  reveal  to  us  wonders 
and  glories  hidden  indeed  from  the  unaided  eye,  but 
none  the  less  real  and  glorious  for  that.1'1 

In  1871  he  wrote: 

"  Love  in  most  minds  is  another  word  for  greed. 
It  does  not  know  how  to  accept,  it  murders  whom 
it  would  sustain,  it  degrades  whom  it  would  raise.'1 

It  was  just  this  feudalistic  tyranny  in  pos- 
sessive and  absorbing  love  and  the  gluttony 
implied  in  lust  which  made  Hinton  a  warrior 
for  a  new  ideal  in  these  matters.  He  saw 
clearly  that  a  false  restraint  implies  a  false 
indulgence,  and  that  a  rule  of  true  service 
will  make  fine  morals  automatic.  He  be- 
lieved that  man,  individually  and  collectively, 
having  passed  through  licence  to  restraint, 
must  pass  beyond  restraint,  where  there  is  a 
finer  liberty  than  either  licence  or  restraint, 
wherein  a  man  or  woman  might  possibly 
break  a  conventional  letter  of  an  obsolete 
law,  but  would  and  could  thereby  fulfil  a 


84       THREE    MODERN   SEERS 

higher  law  of  the  body  and  the  soul.  "  I 
know  how  to  take  care  of  myself,"  said  a 
virtuous  young  man  to  this  observant  doctor. 
Hinton  replied  from  the  higher  law  of  service 
he  believed  in,  "  Say  rather,  I  know  how  to 
take  care  of  the  weakest  woman  who  comes 
in  my  path." 

When  passion  has  become  a  "  balance  oi 
desire,"  man's  sufferings  in  these  matters 
will  diminish,  because  he  will  have  realised 
that  a  passion  for  service  is  very  different 
from  a  passion  for  mere  pleasure. 

"  Whatever  comes  as  service,'1  says  Hinton,  "  let 
there  be  no  question  whether  you  do  it.  The  law 
is,  have  no  law,  and  this  is  expressed  and  made 
intelligent  merely  by  that  physical  condition,  a 
constant  change.  Hold  to  nothing.  Be  ready  for 
anything.  Let  right  change  as  nature  changes,  but 
have  absolute  regard  to  claims." 

As  Miss  Haddon  says  in  The  Larger  Life, 
"  He  only  who  has  refused  all  pleasure  that 
service  forbids  can  accept  all  that  service 
enjoins/' 


HINTONS   ETHICS  85 

Why  Hinton's  morality  may  seem  so  be- 
wildering is  that  it  contains  two  apparent 
contradictions,  which,  in  fact,  are  harmo- 
nious. He  wanted  to  abolish  the  idea  that 
a  thing  is  better  not  to  be  if  there  is  pleasure 
in  it,  and  yet  he  declares  again  and  again 
that  "there  can  be  no  true  having  except 
in  giving  up." 

This  philosophy  aims  a  blow  at  distorted 
asceticism  and  distorted  indulgence.  His 
great  cry  is,  "  Love,  and  do  what  you  like." 
Do  not  restrain  your  impulses,  but  be 
able  to  obey  them.  Do  not  abstain  from 
sensuality,  but  do  not  make  things  sensual. 

"  If  I  am  to  be  remembered  at  all,11  he  said,  "  this 
is  what  I  would  rather  be  remembered  by,  that  I 
was  the  man  who  said.  '  Man  is  made  that  he  can 
rise  above  the  sexual  passion  and  subordinate  it  to 
use.  All  helping  without  taking  the  burden,  all 
serving  that  is  not  heroism,  all  giving  that  has  not 
absolute  losing  in  it,  I  cannot  but  have  a  revulsion 
from,  a  feeling  as  if  I  feared  its  success.1 " 

He  knew  well  enough  that  it  is  impossible 
to  destroy  sensuality  by  letting  it  impulsively 


86      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

run  its  own  way,  and  trust  that  it  may  pick 
up  an  ideal  of  service  on  the  road. 

Duty  and  passion  to-day  are  at  war,  and 
to  strengthen  one  is  to  inflict  a  fatal  blow 
on  the  other.  Hinton  made  an  attempt  to 
reconcile  them  to  the  right  ordering  of  lives. 
A  social  science  that  deals  only  with  the 
external  relations  of  men  and  women  to  each 
other  was  to  him  a  mere  quackery.  From 
within  were  to  flow  the  waters  of  healing. 
Hinton,  at  any  rate,  fulfilled  his  own  ideal 
of  service.  He  did  not  commit  suicide,  but 
he  gave  his  life  for  the  many,  for  he  died 
as  much  from  a  broken  heart  as  an  injured 
brain.  He  was  overworked,  misrepresented, 
torn  and  tortured  with  his  own  speculations, 
which,  in  theory,  seemed  to  him  good,  and 
yet  in  practice  would  bring,  as  he  knew, 
martyrdom  on  the  pioneers  of  his  gospel. 
He  was  a  pure  and  a  good  man ;  but  in 
accepting  his  doctrines,  Nietzsche's  tonic 
philosophy  of  self-control,  and  Carpenter's 
quiet    wisdom    of   unhastiness    should    be 


HINTON'S   ETHICS  87 

taken  as  tonics  and  sedatives.  To  dare  to 
be  free,  one  must  indeed  be  bound.  To 
dare  to  take,  one  must  be  willing  to  give. 
To  ignore  law  safely,  one  must  have  ceased 
to  be  lawless.  Love  is  indeed  the  fulfilling 
of  a  great  law  which  is  outside  all  cruelty, 
commercialism,  and  selfish  absorption.  Its 
very  nature  demands  absolute  mutuality, 
perfect  freedom,  and  a  trinity  of  body,  soul, 
and  spirit.  One  must  have  learnt  to  love 
in  this  true  sense  to  be  without  fear  in  all 
these  great  things.  No  false  thing  can 
long  endure  if  the  true  thing  continually 
confronts  it.  "  Love  and  do  what  you  like," 
as  St.  Augustine  realised  long  before  Hinton, 
is  not  a  motto  for  the  weak  and  sensual,  but 
for  the  strong  of  head  and  the  pure  in  heart, 
who,  in  this  way,  literally  see  their  God. 


CHAPTER   III 

THE    MYSTERY    OF    PAIN 


CHAPTER   III 

THE    MYSTERY    OF    PAIN 

Pain  biologically  a  guardian  angel  of  the  body — 
Also  the  guardian  angel  of  the  soul— Examples  in 
life—"  Forward  ends  "  of  pain. 

From  a  biological  point  of  view  pain  is  the 
guardian  angel  of  the  body.  But  for  pain 
animal  life  would  soon  be  extinguished. 
Pain  and  life  are  as  much  intertwined  in  the 
animal  economy  as  hunger  and  life.  H  unger 
is  an  imperative  need.  Pain  is  an  impera- 
tive warning,  and  so  an  education.  Life 
and  growth  would  cease  in  the  first  stage  of 
evolution  but  for  pain.  The  child  cuts  its 
ringer  ;  it  is  in  pain,  so  it  learns  to  avoid 
the  dangerous  plaything.  The  cat  warms 
itself  on  the  table  by  the  lamp  ;  it  singes  its 
fur,  and,  through  pain,  it  avoids  the  lamp 


92       THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

for  the  future.  The  boy  over-eats ;  he  gets 
pain,  and  so  learns  avoidance  of  that  which 
causes  pain. 

Unconscious  lessons  in  hygiene,  and  hints 
of  taking  what  is  best  and  leaving  what 
is  worst  in  evironment,  are  quickly  learnt 
by  primitive  man,  and  also  by  animals. 
The  latter,  it  is  true,  cannot  analyse,  trans- 
mute, and  change  the  character  of  pain  and 
so  make  it,  in  one  sense,  cease  to  exist  as 
irrational  torture ;  but  the  animal  and  the 
savage  unconsciously  accept  pain's  warning 
and  so  prevent  future  mistakes  and  extinc- 
tion. Pain,  then,  to  the  savage  and  the 
animal,  is  a  physical  guardian  angel. 

Pain  comes  to  all  of  us  at  some  time  or 
another  as  certainly  as  death  comes,  and 
to  some  of  us  its  meaning  is  as  unseen 
as  death's  meaning.  The  usual  attitude  to 
both  pleasure  and  pain  is  the  attitude  of 
the  child  towards  punishment  and  reward. 
Most  of  us,  even  if  we  are  learning  to  bear 
pain    with    courage,   rather   resent  it   than 


THE   MYSTERY   OF   PAIN      93 

welcome  it.  We  certainly  never  seek  it  for 
a  given  end  as  we  seek  pleasure,  Few  of  us 
believe  with  Nietzsche  that  it  is  the  father 
of  pleasure,  or  that  it  is  the  most  educative 
and  valuable  of  gifts. 

When  Hinton  wrote  his  little  book  on 
The  Mystery  of  Pain,  people  were  even  more 
in  the  dark  about  its  inner  significance  than 
they  are  to-day.  Hinton  saw  very  clearly 
what  he  calls  the  "  forward  ends  "  of  pain. 
To  him  pain,  far  from  being  an  evil,  is  an 
essential  element  of  the  highest  good,  felt 
only  as  evil  by  us  because  of  our  want  of 
knowledge  and  want  of  love.  Even  Oscar 
Wilde,  in  his  Soul  of  Man  under  Socialism, 
which  of  course  was  written  long  before 
his  true  understanding  of  acute  suffering, 
says: 

"  Pain  is  not  the  ultimate  mode  of  perfection.  It 
is  merely  provisional  and  a  protest.  It  has  reference 
to  wrong,  unjust,  and  unhealthy  surroundings.  When 
the  wrong,  the  disease,  and  the  injustice  are  removed, 
it  will  have  no  further  place.  Its  sphere  lessens 
every  day.11 


94      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

Hinton  believed  that  the  true  idea  of  the 
mystery  of  pain  will  be  born  out  of  the 
death  of  the  false  idea  of  pain.  He  realised 
very  clearly  that  the  pain  we  suffer  is  often 
suffering  we  make  for  ourselves,  because  we 
do  not  like  the  idea  of  giving.  We  all 
know,  if  we  have  suffered  acutely,  that  when 
we  go  through  any  great  crisis,  bodily  or 
spiritual,  we  are  giving  to  others  through 
the  things  we  learn  and  the  way  we  de- 
velop. We  are  being  ground  by  God's 
wheel  of  necessity,  not  only  for  our  own 
good,  but  for  the  good  of  others,  so  that 
ultimately  we  can  see,  even  here  on  earth, 
that  every  pain  we  bear  and  conquer  has  had 
"  forward  ends." 

Hinton  looked  upon  pain  as  nutrition, 
and  the  service  and  human  love  which 
ought  always  to  be  a  result  of  that  as 
function.  It  is  not  pain  itself,  according  to 
Hinton,  which  is  evil,  but  pain  seen  by 
itself,  as  the  discord  in  music  seems  a  jar 
until  it  melts  into  a  harmony.     Here,  once 


THE   MYSTERY   OF   PAIN      95 

more,  we  find  that  it  is  not  the  thing  itself, 
but  the  way  we  approach  and  use  it  that  is 
of  vital  importance. 

Hinton,  all  through  his  philosophy, 
emphasises  the  fact  that  we  must  not 
confound  eternal  truth  with  the  limita- 
tion of  our  perception  with  regard  to 
truth.  When  we  are  in  the  midst  of 
our  sufferings  we  are  necessarily  swamped 
more  or  less  in  our  limitations,  and  so  lose 
sight,  for  the  time,  of  the  great  meaning 
behind  the  experience.  This  meaning  is 
that  something  is  accomplished  in  our 
experience  which  is  unseen  by  us,  and  so 
makes  conscious  or  unconscious  sacrifice 
a  good. 

By  sacrifice  Hinton  means  love  willingly 
or  unconsciously  shown  towards  others. 
This  unseen  work  that  is  done  indirectly 
through  us  is  something  done  directly  for 
others.  Science,  our  own  experience,  and 
certainly  all  true  mysticism,  teach  us  that 
"  things  are  not  what  they  seem."     Hinton, 

7 


96       THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

in  his  Mystery  of  Pain,  makes   this    very- 
clear.     He  says  : 

"  It  is  evident  that  all  the  effects  of  the  events 
with  which  we  are  concerned  are  not,  and  could 
not  possibly  be,  perceived  by  us.  We  see  and  feel 
things,  alike  the  great  ones  and  the  small  ones,  as 
we  esteem  them,  only  as  they  affect  our  senses  :  that 
is,  only  in  small  part  and  for  a  short  time.  They 
soon  pass  beyond  our  sight,  and  while  they  are 
within  it  they  never  show  us  all  they  are,  often  those 
which  are  the  greatest  seeming  to  us  the  least.  How 
little  we  are  able,  often,  to  calculate  the  influence 
even  upon  our  own  future  of  events  or  actions  of 
which  we  seem  to  have  the  most  perfect  knowledge 
at  the  time,  and  of  the  effects  of  these  events  on 
others,  which  must  go  on,  so  far  as  we  can  estimate, 
without  any  end ;  only  the  smallest  fragment  is 
within  our  view.  It  is  one  of  the  first  lessons  taught 
to  men  by  experience,  not  to  judge  of  events  by 
what  they  seem  alone,  but  to  remember  that  there 
may  be  much  more  involved  in  them  than  appears. 
To  judge  of  our  life,  therefore,  merely  by  that  which 
is  seen  of  it,  is  to  commit  ourselves  to  certain  error." 

So  that  the  thought  Hinton  emphasised, 
that  in  all  our  experience  there  is  some 
unseen   relation    to    spiritual   things,    to   a 


THE   MYSTERY   OF   PAIN      97 

spiritual  work  in  man,  makes  on  us  no  new 
demand.  It  is  but  the  carrying  out  to  their 
legitimate,  and  surely  to  their  natural  result, 
principles  which  experience  has  established. 
We  shall  certainly  be  thinking  and  feeling 
falsely  respecting  our  life  if  we  cannot 
recognise  some  unseen  bearing  of  it.  For 
we  do  not,  we  know  we  cannot,  see  the 
whole. 

And  this  principle  is  established  not  only 
by  moral  experience.  It  is  the  lesson  which, 
almost  more  than  any  other,  science  teaches 
us  also.  In  exploring  the  material  world, 
we  soon  find  that,  in  order  to  understand 
any  part  of  it  aright,  we  must  recognise 
things  which  are  unseen,  and  have  regard  to 
conditions  which  do  not  come  within  our 
direct  perception.  It  is  enough,  as  Hinton 
points  out,  to  instance  the  pressure  of  the 
air,  of  which  we  have  no  consciousness  ;  the 
motion  of  the  earth,  equally  unperceivable 
by  us ;  the  hidden  force  lurking  in  unseen 
atoms ;  of  chemical   affinity  or  electricity  ; 


98      THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

the  vibrations  which  traverse  the  universal 
ether ;  and,  in  fine,  that  invisible  unity 
whereby  (holding  to  the  unseen)  man  has 
traced  out  in  nature  a  perfect  order  amid 
all  confusion. 

Hinton  concludes,  in  every  summing-up 
in  his  books  respecting  the  mysterious  work- 
ings of  pain,  that  it  has  ends  far  beyond 
the  interests  of  the  person  who  bears  it, 
and  for  these  secret  ends  we  must  look 
beyond  ourselves.  All  must  realise,  on 
looking  back  over  their  lives,  that  their 
deepest  miseries,  their  intolerable  anguish, 
and  their  so-called  "  losses  "  had  "  forward 
ends,"  not  only  for  themselves  but  for 
others.  Most  of  us  have  paid,  what  seemed 
at  the  time,  a  terrible  price  for  the  increase 
in  our  humanity  and  the  decrease  in  our 
personal  vanity,  or  the  uprooting  of  our 
jealousy  and  the  intensity  of  our  powers 
of  loving.  The  people  who  tell  us  that 
pain  should  be  got  out  of  the  world  would 
also  tell  us  that  no  harmony  in  music  can 


THE    MYSTERY   OF   PAIN      99 

contain  a  discord.  How  many  of  us  in  this 
mortal  life  can  trace  the  "  forward  ends  "  of 
our  personal  pain  ?  It  becomes  easier  once 
one  believes,  what  Hinton  truly  believed, 
that  the  "  forward  ends  "  justify  the  painful 
means.  Take  any  example  of  suffering. 
If  you  have  had  a  lonely  and  misunder- 
stood childhood,  perhaps  even  real  cruelty 
and  physical  disablement  as  a  result  of  that 
cruelty,  which  may  last  you  all  your  life, 
what  has  that  done  for  you  ?  Every  little 
child  you  touch  and  make  happy  can 
answer  the  question  for  you. 

What  if,  at  the  very  height  of  your 
idealism  and  romance,  you  failed  to  marry 
the  man  or  woman  who  seemed  the  only 
person  in  the  world  who  could  help  you 
to  obtain  your  ideal  and  fulfil  yourself? 
What  if,  instead  of  living  side  by  side  with 
what  you  imagined  to  be  your  mate,  you 
had  to  have  three  hundred  and  sixty-five 
breakfasts,  dinners,  and  teas  a  year  with 
one  who  chiefly  made  demands  on  you,  and 


100     THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

rarely  gave  you  the  spiritual  and  emotional 
food  you  craved,  but  drew  from  you  all 
you  had  to  give  ?  Are  there  no  "  forward 
ends  "  there  ?  Perhaps  only  your  children 
and  grand-children  can  answer  that  question. 
One  recalls  what  John  said  in  The  Choi?' 
Invisible,  in  the  one  love-letter  he  ever 
penned  to  his  Jessica,  the  woman  whom  he 
missed  marrying,  though  she  was  his  affinity, 
a  woman  who  lifted  every  action  of  his  life 
out  of  the  commonplace.  When  he  sends 
her  his  son,  as  a  youth  about  his  own  age 
when  he  first  met  her,  he  writes  : 

"  I  may  not  boast  with  the  Apostle  that  I  have 
fought  a  good  fight,  but  I  can  say  that  I  have 
fought  a  hard  one.  The  fight  will  always  be  hard 
for  any  man  who  undertakes  to  conquer  life  with 
the  few  and  simple  weapons  I  have  used  and  who 
will  accept  victory  only  upon  such  terms  as  I  have 
demanded.  For,  be  my  success  small  or  great,  it 
has  been  won  without  wilful  wrong  of  a  single 
human  being  and  without  inner  compromise  or 
other  form  of  self-abasement.  No  man  can  look 
me  in  the  eyes    and    say   I   ever   wronged    him    for 


THE   MYSTERY   OF   PAIN     101 

my  own  profit ;  none  may  charge  that  I  have  smiled 
on  him  in  order  to  use  him,  or  called  him  my 
friend  that  I  might  make  him  do  for  me  the  work 
of  a  servant.  Do  not  imagine  I  fail  to  realise 
that  I  have  added  my  full  share  to  the  general 
evil  of  the  world  ;  in  part  unconsciously,  in  part 
against  my  conscious  will.  It  is  the  knowledge  of 
this  influence  of  imperfection  for  ever  flowing  from 
myself  to  all  others,  that  has  taught  me  charity 
with  all  the  wrongs  that  flow  from  others  toward 
me.  As  I  have  clung  to  myself  despite  the  evil, 
so  I  have  clung  to  the  world  despite  all  the  evil 
that  is  in  the  world.  To  lose  faith  in  men,  not  in 
humanity  ;  to  see  justice  go  down  and  not  believe 
in  the  triumph  of  injustice  ;  for  every  wrong  that 
you  weakly  deal  another  or  another  deals  you,  to 
love  more  and  more  the  fairness  and  beauty  of  what 
is  right ;  and  so  to  turn  with  ever-increasing  love 
from  the  imperfection  that  is  in  us  all  to  the  per- 
fection that  is  above  us  all — the  Perfection  that  is 
God, — this  is  one  of  the  ideals  of  actual  duty  that 
you  once  said  were  to  be  as  candles  in  my  hand. 
Many  a  time  this  candle  has  gone  out ;  but  as  quickly 
as  I  could  snatch  any  torch,  with  your  sacred  name 
on  my  lips,  it  has  been  relighted." 

This    was    the   kind   of   "  forward   end " 
Hinton   had   in   his   mind   when   he  wrote 


102     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

his  Mystery  of  Pain.  Every  man,  every 
woman,  who  has  lost  the  personal  and  made 
the  apparent  loss  serve  such  a  "  forward 
end  "  as  this  is  at  peace,  not  only  about  his 
own  destiny,  but  about  the  general  upshot 
of  things. 

Certainly  there  are  worse  things  than 
mere  loss  by  separation.  Suppose  a  man 
or  woman  you  loved  betrayed  you,  as  the 
world  calls  betrayal,  mocked  and  scorned 
you  secretly,  misunderstood  you,  derided 
you  even.  Well  ?  Have  you  not  again 
and  again  given  a  tenderness  and  help  to 
some  tight-mouthed,  embittered  woman  or 
man  which  she  or  he  would  never  have 
gained  by  their  mere  personal  absorption 
in  another  ?  It  has  probably  only  been  a 
means  of  understanding  another  sufferer, 
for  those  who  mock  and  betray  are  in 
some  form  of  terror  or  pain.  If,  again, 
you  have  loved  with  both  the  mystic  and 
the  human  in  you,  witli  all  the  body,  soul, 
and    spirit    of    you,    and    death,    Nature's 


THE   MYSTERY   OF   PAIN     103 

mother,  took  that  very  soul  of  your  soul 
out  of  your  reach  when  you  imagined  that 
it  was  most  vital  to  you  here  and  now — 
what  then  ?  Only  those  who  have  had  to 
face  utter  and  complete  loneliness  of  body, 
soul,  and  spirit  by  the  bedside  of  what 
looks  so  terribly  like  the  end  can  realise 
how  difficult  it  is,  just  then,  to  believe 
that  this  pain  of  separation  has  greater 
"  forward  ends  "  than  any  other.  Hinton 
knew,  Dante  knew,  all  true  lovers  who  have 
lost  and  found  again  after  the  great  change 
of  death  know,  that  pain  is  first  nutrition 
and  then  function. 

There  is  but  one  condition  for  peace. 
It  is  not  an  easy  one,  but  it  is  a  certain 
one.  It  is  to  be  true  to  what  we  know 
and  then  remain  receptive.  Pain  in  this 
way  merges,  by  the  law  of  its  nature,  into 
happiness,  a  happiness  which  not  only 
affects  a  single  person,  but  a  multitude. 
Some  know  that  death  is  often  the  only 
way   to   the   very   truth   and    the    life   we 


104     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

hungered  for  even  in  the  midst  of  what 
seemed  a  perfect  love  here.  It  may  have 
been  the  only  way  to  the  greater  love 
which  sweeps  us  beyond  the  merely  per- 
sonal into  that  region  of  service  and  love 
which  Hinton  believed  in  with  all  his  heart 
and  soul. 

It  is  strange  how  we  go  on  dreading 
pain  when  it  leads  us  to  the  open  road  of 
understanding  and  love  again  and  again ! 
How  many  people  do  you  know  who  have 
been  truly  helped  in  the  big,  broad,  human 
sense  except  by  those  who  have  suffered  ? 
Even  physical  suffering,  whether  acute  pain 
or  illnesses  lengthened  out  to  months  and 
years,  teach  us  how  to  rest  and  to  gain  the 
inner  vision  which  all  physical  rest  should 
bring  in  the  intervals  of  pain.  It  is  only 
the  resentment  against  suffering,  the  un- 
willingness to  accept  it  as  a  lesson  in 
some  unseen  service,  which  causes  its  real 
anguish.  In  the  midst  of  suffering  we 
cannot  realise  what  a  gift  pain  is,  but  some 


THE   MYSTERY   OF   PAIN     105 

of  us  have  come  to  the  time  when  we  can 
say  honestly,  and  from  our  very  hearts,  that 
we  would  gladly,  not  grudgingly  and  of 
necessity,  but  gladly  suffer  all  over  again, 
if  another  soul  could  see,  as  our  soul  sees, 
the  "  forward  ends." 

Hinton  knew  the  great  secret  of  the 
other,  clearer  side  of  things  when  he  said, 
"  Never  be  afraid  of  giving  up  your  best, 
and  God  will  give  you  His  better."  He 
did  not,  of  course,  mean  this  in  the  selfish 
spirit  of  thanksgiving  for  selfish  ends,  or  in 
the  expectation  of  more  good  to  follow,  but 
in  the  spirit  of  love  which  says,  "  I  would 
bear  this  for  my  neighbour,  even  if  I  have 
to  be  damned  for  it."  Hinton  knew,  as 
Christ  knew,  that  giving  up  is  the  one 
condition  of  having  a  better  thing.  When 
we  give  up  our  jealousy,  for  instance,  we 
get  a  true  realisation  of  love.  "He  that 
loseth  his  life  shall  find  it,"  was  not  the 
sorry  jest  of  a  carpenter's  son,  but  the  latest 
discovery  of  science  and  philosophy  by  those 


106     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

who  know  more  than  they  dare  at  present 
reveal. 

"  Giving,"  says  Hinton,  "  is  an  absolute  good : 
that  innocent  loss  and  pain,  even  the  unconscious 
like  the  willing  loss,  is  really  giving,  and,  further, 
this  good  (of  giving)  is  always  ready  to  be  the  boon 
of  every  loser,  however  long  delayed,  as  soon  as  ever 
he  accepts  his  pain  and  is  glad  for  its  good's  sake 
that  he  bore  it.  Pain  is  giving,  and  giving  is  good. 
In  giving  pain  to  man,  then,  God  is  giving  him  the 
best  thing.  Perhaps  this  is  the  only  world  in  the 
universe  where  giving  is  pain.11 

As  we  get  the  newer  vision  we  shall  be 
less  agitated  as  to  what  comes  to  us,  and 
more  anxious  as  to  how  we  bear  what 
comes.  It  is  not  what  we  get  which  matters, 
but  what  we  are ;  not  what  we  lose,  but 
what  we  gain.  It  is  how  we  receive  pain, 
what  experience  we  gain  for  ourselves  and 
others  through  our  individual  suffering,  that 
is  the  main  thing.  Hinton  would  have  us 
always  stop  to  consider,  in  the  questions 
of  pain  and  pleasure  alike,  not  so  much 
how  pain  and   pleasure  may  affect   us   in- 


THE    MYSTERY   OF   PAIN     107 

dividually,  but  how  they,  through  the 
absorption  of  them  into  character  and 
actions,  affect  others.  Having  freely  re- 
ceived, either  from  pleasure  or  pain,  it  is  our 
part  to  transmute  both  into  a  blessedness 
with  which  each  and  any  human  being  near 
us  can  enrich  himself,  and  so  hand  on  the 
same  good  to  others.  "  I  will  scatter  myself 
among  men  and  women  as  I  go,"  was  not 
only  the  privilege  of  the  big,  human- 
hearted  Walt  Whitman,  but  of  every  man 
and  woman  who  has  suffered  enough  and 
loved  enough  to  dare  to  give  of  what  they 
have  received.  The  bondage  of  both  plea- 
sure and  pain,  according  to  James  Hinton, 
is  the  bondage  we  make  out  of  our  insistence 
on  self-seeking. 

"  That  hurts  me,"  we  say  ;  "  this  satisfies 
me";  and  out  of  that  conception  we  get 
much  less  development  or  even  happiness 
than  from  the  cry,  "Out  of  these  depths  my 
very  so-called  enemy  can  get  the  joy  I  have 
had  to  miss."'     When  man  can  truly  say  of 


108     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

pain,  "  Yes,  this  hurts  me  so  that  I  can  give 
the  result  on  to  you,"  and  of  pleasure,  "  This 
takes  possession  of  me  so  that  I  can  fling 
the  joy  on  to  you,  whether  you  are  my 
friend  or  my  slanderer,"  then  we  are  nearer 
the  meaning  of  Hinton,  much  nearer,  than 
when  we  approach  both  pleasure  and  pain 
either  as  things  to  be  avoided  or  things 
to  be  sought  in  and  for  themselves  alone. 

Man  has  learnt  much,  but  he  has  infinitely 
more  to  learn,  even  in  this  world,  for  he  has 
not  as  yet  been  able  to  rid  himself  of  sorrow 
as  an  evil  thing.  It  is  possible  that  in  this 
world  we  may  never  get  rid  of  sorrow  and 
suffering,  but  we  can  all  transform  them  and 
transmute  them  into  an  ardour  for  service 
which  has  an  exquisiteness  of  its  own  as  great 
as  pleasure  itself,  perhaps  greater.  "  The 
seeming  of  our  life,"  says  Hinton,  "  is  not 
the  truth  of  it."  The  great  secret  is  not 
to  seek  either  suffering  or  pleasure,  but  to 
accept  them  when  they  come  as  inspirations, 
or,  in  other  words,  as  means   to  a  definite 


THE   MYSTERY   OF   PAIN     109 

end.  When  once  one  has  learnt  this,  in 
ever  so  small  a  degree,  the  whole  of  life  is 
altered.  It  is  as  if  we  had  pierced  the  veil. 
We  have  all  to  learn,  though  we  do  not  see 
the  end,  to  trust  the  end,  and  out  of  trust  a 
curious  insight  comes,  and  a  distinct  know- 
ledge. Once  the  conscious  and  sub-conscious 
selves  meet  in  a  harmony  of  understanding 
of  spiritual  "  forward  ends "  then  the  fret 
and  jar  and  doubt  are  for  ever  laid  to  rest. 

"  By  giving,11  says  Hinton,  "  to  our  pains  a  place 
of  use  and  necessity,  not  central  in  ourselves  but  ex- 
tending to  others,  and  indeed  affecting  others  chiefly 
as  existing  for  and  essential  to  God's  great  work  in 
the  world,  by  giving  to  our  painful  experience  this 
place,  the  whole  aspect  of  pain  would  be  changed. 
A  Christ,  a  mother,  a  martyr,  and  a  lover  have 
this  vision,  and  the  nearer  we  are  to  their  point  of 
view  the  less  we  worry  about  the  sordidness  of  pain, 
because  we  are  concerned  with  its  mystery  and 
beauty.  The  mental  understanding  of  what  suffer- 
ing indicates  alters  the  actual  suffering.'" 

Pain,  if  it  could  be  recognised  as  develop- 
ment, and  in  a  sense  as  joy,  would   be  as 


110     THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

much  welcomed  as  pleasure  is  now.  We 
have  distorted  our  conceptions  of  both 
pleasure  and  pain.  We  are  afraid  of  both, 
instead  of  recognising  them  as  two  parts  of 
the  development  of  the  soul.  They  are  the 
male  and  female  of  the  spiritual  life  ;  neither 
are  good  alone  but  as  a  completion  the  one 
of  the  other.     As  Hinton  so  well  puts  it : 

"  The  reason  we  are  made,  or  seem  to  be  as  if  we 
were  made,  for  pain,  is  that  we  are  made  for  love.  I 
don't  mean  grudging,  unhappy  sacrifice,  but  love, 
which,  having  freely  received,  freely  gives  and  suffers 
gladly,  if  need  be,  so  that  pain  is  swallowed  up 
in  love  and  turns  thereby  into  joy.'" 

We  may  well  pray  to  be  delivered  from 
pain  as  it  is  usually  understood.  When  we 
are  delivered  from  pain  as  we  now  under- 
stand it,  that  is  the  bondage  of  pain,  into 
the  understanding  of  pain  as  freedom  and 
education,  then,  and  then  only,  can  we 
rightly  understand  pleasure.  What  makes 
pain  to  us  what  it  appears  to  be  is  that 
man  is  constantly  aiming  at  ends  which  do 


THE   MYSTERY   OF   PAIN     111 

not  involve  any  giving  up.  When  these 
ends  are  denied  him  he  suffers,  and  he 
will  always  suffer,  in  a  way  unnecessarily, 
till  he  accepts  once  and  for  ever  the  great 
truth  that  a  man  only  finds  when  he  gives 
up,  that  is,  when  he  has  ceased  to  clutch 
or  even  demand  or  expect  for  himself,  but 
takes  pleasure  and  pain  as  they  come  and 
gives  of  the  good  he  has  received,  as  chance 
offers.  It  is  the  very  pith  of  all  the  deepest 
and  yet  simplest  philosophies  of  the  world. 
It  is,  probably,  the  one  key  we  have  to  the 
other  side  of  things  where  giving  may  pos- 
sibly be  as  certain  a  law  as  the  law  of 
gravitation  is  here. 

In  these  days  people  are  saying  very 
contradictory  things  about  pain.  One 
school  says  it  is  a  very  good  thing  and 
should  be  sought,  and  another  says  it  is 
a  very  bad  thing  and  should  be  shunned. 
Those  who  say  it  is  a  good  thing  are  right, 
and  those  who  say  it  is  a  bad  thing  are 
right ;    but    they    each    hold    only    half   of 

8 


112    THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

the  truth.  If  the  people  who  say  pain  is 
a  good  thing  mean  that  it  is  good  as  a 
means  to  an  end,  then  so  far  they  are  right ; 
but  if  they  say  it  is  good  for  and  in  itself, 
and  as  an  end  in  itself,  then  they  are  wrong. 
If  those  who  say  pain  is  bad  mean  that  all 
senseless  suffering  is  bad,  they  are  right  so 
far,  but  they  must  say  a  little  more.  The 
great  rule  here,  as  in  many  other  matters,  is 
not  to  seek,  but  to  accept  what  comes  in  a 
new  spirit. 

Pain  once  seen  as  a  means  to  an  end,  a 
discipline,  an  education,  then  the  old  vin- 
dictive idea  of  it  as  an  atonement  or  a  sense- 
less punishment  goes  the  way  of  all  childish 
and  cruel  things,  in  the  face  of  a  bigger 
vision.  When  the  unseen  ends  for  which 
pain  has  moulded  us  are  understood,  then 
we  are  out  of  the  bondage  of  a  very  present 
death.  Hinton  realised,  as  very  few  have 
realised,  that  the  "  true  affinities  of  sacrifice 
are  with  pleasure,  with  rapture  even."  Every- 
one who  has  willingly  given  up  the  lesser 


THE   MYSTERY   OF   PAIN     113 

for  the  greater,  the  personal  for  the  uni- 
versal, an  appetite  for  a  passion  of  service, 
knows  this  to  be  true. 

This  newer  conception  of  pain  as  a  good 
or  necessary  thing  must,  of  course,  not 
induce  us  to  seek  pain  for  itself,  or  in  any 
way  to  undervalue  joy.  This  is  exactly 
where  many  good,  true,  devout,  and  limited 
people  make  a  great  mistake.  Men  have 
always  recognised  a  goodness  in  things  that 
are  painful,  even  without  analysing  or  un- 
derstanding their  feelings  about  it.  They 
have  recognised  the  goodness  in  things  ap- 
parently evil,  and  certainly  painful,  but  they 
have  mistaken  where  the  goodness  comes 
in.  They  have  confounded  the  goodness 
which  belongs  to  sacrifice  or  love  with  the 
goodness  which  is  in  pain  itself,  as  a  mere 
cleanser  or  restorer.  They  have  mistaken 
the  means  for  the  end,  hence  asceticism. 
This  seeking  pain  as  a  good  in  itself,  and 
not  as  a  means  to  good,  and  cultivating 
self-denial  as  an  end,  and  not  as  a  way  to 


114     THREE    MODERN   SEERS 

an  end,  is  just  where  religious  and  well- 
meaning  people  put  stumbling-blocks  in  the 
way  of  weaker  brethren. 

The  mystery  of  pain  is  a  prelude  to  the 
mystery  of  pleasure.  It  is  the  apparent 
discord  melting  into  the  true  harmony.  The 
spiritual  law  is  that  the  mystery  of  pain 
merges  by  degrees  into  the  mystery  of 
pleasure.  Pain  is  the  very  root  of  pleasure. 
"  Only  that  painful  thing  is  good  which  has 
in  it  the  root  of  pleasure/'  says  Hinton,  in 
his  Mystery  of  Pain,  and  he  is  right,  for 
this  it  is  alone  which  serves  others'  good. 
Therefore  no  arbitrary,  self-chosen  sacrifice 
is  good.  There  is  no  source  of  joy  in  it.  It 
fails  of  its  very  first  condition,  spontaneous 
love.  The  merest  feeling  of  vanity  or 
hope  of  salvation  for  self  alters  the  whole 
character  of  giving  up  for  others.  Only  that 
sacrifice  is  good,  according  to  Hinton,  which 
we  accept  for  another's  sake,  or  that  which 
serves  as  an  end  unseen  by  us.  For,  seen 
or   unseen   service   and  joyous    sacrifice   is 


THE   MYSTERY   OF   PAIN     115 

good,  but  only  when  it  is  for  service ;  and 
by  service  Hinton  always  implies  love. 

According  to  Hinton,  we  must  look  upon 
our  pain  as  our  contribution  to  the  redemp- 
tion of  the  world.  In  this  way,  he  says, 
we  link  our  weakness  with  omnipotence, 
our  blindness  with  omniscience.  Hinton 's 
conclusion  to  The  Mystery  of  Pain  leads  us 
to  realise  that  he  believed  that  it  is  as  good 
to  be  sacrificed,  to  be  poor  and  wretched, 
halt,  maimed,  and  bruised,  heart-broken, 
spiritless,  incapable,  and  apparently  lost,  as 
to  be  happy  and  prosperous  ;  if  not  for  our 
sakes,  it  is  for  some  one  else's  good  that  this 
is  so.  Torquemada  may  have  contributed 
as  much  to  your  development  and  mine  as 
Joan  of  Arc  has. 

Vindictive  condemnation,  without  under- 
standing of  what  we  condemn,  may  possibly 
bring  a  retribution  for  the  condemner  he 
least  expects.  Hardness  of  heart,  self- 
sufficiency,  mere  intellectual  vainglory,  and 
cut  and  dried  morality  need  all  the  suffering 


116     THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

the  great  Spirit  can  send  to  enable  a  man 
and  woman  to  come  out  into  the  region  of 
forgiveness  and  loving-kindness. 

We  are  all,  whether  we  know  it  or  not, 
helped  by  invisible  helpers,  and  the  greater 
the  need  the  stronger  the  help.  If  pain 
teaches  us  what  we  refuse  to  learn  without 
it ;  if  it  helps  us  to  strengthen  others  and 
control  ourselves  as  we  could  not  have  done 
if  we  had  not  learnt  our  own  lesson  with 
tears  and  misgivings ;  if  it  tends  in  a  small 
degree  towards  the  redemption  of  the  world, 
as  it  is  meant  to  be  redeemed, — let  us  cease 
croaking  and  groaning  over  our  sufferings, 
and  cry  with  Browning,  as  he  passed  into 
the  clearer  paths  he  was  assured  of : 

"  Now,  at  noonday,  in  the  bustle  of  man's  work  time, 
Greet  the  unseen  with  a  cheer  ! 
Bid  him  forward,  breast  and  back  as  either  should  be, 
*  Strive   and   thrive  ! '     Cry,   '  Speed,   fight   on, 
for  ever  there  as  here.1 " 

George  Fox's  description  of  his  spiritual 
awakening   might  be  repeated  by  some  of 


THE   MYSTERY   OF   PAIN     117 

us  when  we  first  realise  the  inner  meaning 
of  the  mystery  of  pain  : 

"  Now  was  I  come  up  in  spirit  through  the  flaming 
sword  into  the  paradise  of  God.  All  things  were 
new,  and  all  the  creation  gave  another  smell  unto 
me  than  before,  beyond  what  words  can  utter.1"' 

Hinton — hit  and  hurt  as  he  was  by  those 
who  ought  to  have  been  wise  enough  to 
understand  his  message,  misunderstood  as 
he  was  by  the  crowd,  scarcely  realising  the 
might  of  his  own  vision — guessed,  at  any 
rate,  that  the  joy  of  heaven  is  the  joy  of 
giving  up,  of  saving  others  out  of  our 
own  lessons  in  sin  and  pain.  The  nearer 
we  approach  to  this  spirit,  not  grudgingly 
or  of  a  necessity  for  personal  salvation,  but 
in  the  lover's  mood  of  lavish  exaltation  of 
longing  to  rob  himself  in  order  to  bless 
what  he  loves,  just  in  proportion  as  we 
approach  this  newer  view  of  love  shall  we 
realise  what  the  mystery  of  pain  really 
means. 

When  we  know  that  perfect  joy  is  perfect 


118     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

giving,  then  we  are  near  the  kingdom  of 
divine  things ;  and  divine  things  are  not 
dull  things,  but  have  in  them  the  fulness  we 
dimly  realise  when  we  love,  when  we  hear 
music,  when,  in  fact,  we  are  as  little  chil- 
dren, and  so  in  the  mood  to  catch  the 
undertone  in  natural,  mystical  things. 

Love  in  service— that  is,  a  giving  up 
readily  for  another's  need,  no  matter  how 
degraded  or  wretched  we  may  assume  that 
person  to  be  who  needs  our  help — love  in 
service  is  to  the  soul  what  healthy  exercise 
is  to  the  body,  according  to  Hinton.  When 
we  are  in  feeble  spiritual  health  we  begrudge 
the  giving,  and  so  concentrate  our  power  on 
ourselves  alone,  as  in  disease  our  thoughts 
are  on  our  physical  inconveniences,  and  our 
very  muscles  refuse  their  work  as  our  physical 
vigour  is  impaired. 

Let  us  realise  then,  quite  simply  and 
bravely,  that  as  man  rises,  he  often  suffers 
more,  not  less.  He  ought  to  complain  less, 
it  is  true,  as  he  understands  more,  for  the 


THE   MYSTERY   OF    PAIN     119 

meaning  of  his  pain  becomes  evident  to 
him.  "  Before  the  eyes  can  see  they  must 
be  incapable  of  tears,"  says  Mabel  Collins 
in  The  Light  on  the  Path.  As  Mr.  Binns 
points  out  in  his  Life  of  Walt  Whitman : 

"  The  wise  soul  uses  the  excellence  of  things, 
and  so  things  hurt  it  not  at  all.  Live  your  life, 
then,  in  faith  not  in  fear,  such  is  the  word  of  the 
Mystic.11 

To  sum  up,  pain  is  the  guardian  angel 
of  the  spiritual  man  as  well  as  of  the  beast 
and  the  primitive  man.  From  a  biological, 
mental,  and  spiritual  standpoint  pain  is  the 
thing  as  yet  we  can  least  dispense  with,  and, 
when  joined  to  its  twin,  love,  can  wash  us 
cleaner  and  heal  us  more  certainly  than  any- 
thing else  in  the  world.  Those  who  suffer 
learn ;  those  who  love  know.  Those  who 
have  learnt  through  the  knowledge  suffering 
and  love  can  alone  bring  dare  to  be  fools 
as  the  world  counts  foolishness,  dare  to  be 
despised  and  rejected  of  men  and  acquainted 
with  grief  because  their  vision  makes  them 


120     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

free.     They  take,  in  all  its  literalness,  one  of 
the  sayings  of  Jesus  only  lately  discovered  : 

"  Let  not  him  who  seeks  cease  until  he  finds,  and 
when  he  finds  he  shall  be  astonished.  Astonished  he 
shall  reach  the  Kingdom,  and,  having  reached  the 
Kingdom,  he  shall  rest.11 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE    MYSTERY    OF    PLEASURE 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE    MYSTERY    OF    PLEASURE 

False  conception  of  pleasure — Hinton's  view  of  it 
as  lover  of  nature  and  mystic—  The  ascetic  and 
sensualist  foes  to  right  understanding  of  pleasure 
— Pleasure  a  right  in  itself— Restraint  alone  not 
enough — Sexual  love  as  a  sacrament  -Nature 
makes  goodness  and  pleasure  one  in  the  marriage 
relation— Relationship  between  man  and  woman 
a  mystical  one. 

To  the  average  Anglo-Saxon  mind,  pleasure 
does  not  suggest  a  magnet  for  drawing  souls 
to  heaven.  Pain,  some  of  us  argue,  is  justi- 
fied in  the  scheme  of  things  through  its  very 
evident  results  in  nations  and  persons ;  but 
pleasure,  the  sheer  joy  of  a  thing  for  itself, 
smacks  of  immorality  or  impulsive  and 
youthful  licence. 

Pleasure,  to  many  people,  often  implies  a 
worse  pain  than  pain  itself,  because  of  the 


124     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

false  conception  we  have  of  an  imperative 
need  in  our  nature,  a  craving  as  urgent  as 
hunger  or  thirst,  the  need  for  legitimate  and 
delicious  joy.  It  will  take  some  of  us  a  long 
time  to  get  rid  of  the  monastic  system,  as 
Hinton  so  well  describes  our  unnatural  re- 
straints to  be.  In  nothing  do  we  need  a 
way  of  escape  more  than  in  our  slavery  to 
traditions  about  this  matter  of  pleasure. 

If  we  wish  to  be  artists  in  life,  Hinton 
maintained,  we  must  follow  what  he  con- 
sidered to  be  the  painter's  methods  in  de- 
velopment, and  work  from  sheer  impulse, 
through  restraint  and  detail,  to  a  deeper 
and  simpler  expression.  In  this  question  of 
pleasure  we  have  not  even  begun  to  under- 
stand the  impulse  behind  pleasure,  though 
we  are  grappling  with  elaborate  detailed 
restraint  in  the  matter,  in  a  ferocious  moral 
anxiety  lest  we  should  be  damned  before  we 
have  co-ordinated  our  system  of  personal 
torture  in  order  to  effect  personal  salvation. 
The  larger  freedom,   which  implies  neither 


MYSTERY   OF   PLEASURE      125 

restraint  nor  asceticism,  is  not  as  yet  within 
the  range  of  vision  of  the  majority  of  people. 
Before  analysing  Hinton's  wise  and  unwise 
views  of  this  mystery  of  pleasure,  it  may  be 
well  to  imagine  that  our  preconceived  con- 
ceptions of  pleasure  do  not  exist. 

Let  us  look  at  the  matter  from  a  natural 
standard  and  a  mystic  standard,  not  from 
the  standard  of  the  sensualist  and  the 
ascetic.  This  is  very  difficult,  as  no  question 
is  so  bound  up  with  terrifying  inanities  and 
ugly  misconceptions  as  this  one  of  pleasure. 
From  a  biological  point  of  view,  pleasure  is 
a  guardian  angel  of  the  body  as  much  as 
pain  is.  One  impels  the  animal  to  choose 
the  pleasing  thing  in  function  which  will 
intensify  the  vitality  of  the  race,  as  the  other 
defends  the  animal  from  the  thing  which 
will  injure  or  extinguish  physical  life.  If 
we  start  with  the  assertion  that  the  condition 
for  taking  pleasure  is  freedom  from  self  and 
at  the  same  time  is  a  true  expression  of  self, 
we  shall,  in  following  out  this  apparently 


126    THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

contradictory  statement,  realise  that  what 
Hinton  believed  is  true,  that  whatever  is 
most  pleasure  will  be  found  to  be  the  true 
order  in  the  end.  Whatever  gives  the  most 
freedom  to  real  love,  whatever  gives  the 
most  passionateness  of  joy  to  passion,  will 
be  the  nearest  to  service  and  not  the  furthest 
away  from  it. 

Because  we  make  war  on  pleasures  that 
are  against  service  we  ought  not  therefore 
to  make  war  on  pleasures  that  are  for  service, 
or  we  shall  divert  the  great  force  of  true 
pleasure  to  false  issues  and  so  divide  power 
against  itself. 

Hinton  saw  the  force  of  this  as  perhaps 
no  modern  moralist  has.  When  people 
speak  of  pleasure,  they  are  more  often  than 
not  confounding  pleasure  with  impurity, 
laxity,  or  excess.  It  is  as  if  we  declared 
that  the  cough  of  a  consumptive  is  the  man 
himself.  We  have  to  face  the  mystery 
of  pleasure,  not  as  we  imagined  it,  but  as 
it   ought   to   be.     The   change  of  attitude 


MYSTERY   OF   PLEASURE     127 

which  is  bound  to  come  in  this  matter  is 
a  spiritual  one  more  than  a  physical  change. 
The  kind  of  purity  and  restraint  the  average 
person  advocates  is  the  kind  of  purity 
disease  or  mutilation  might  bring,  not  the 
joy  and  throb  of  a  healthy  organism  re- 
sponding to  and  attracting  all  things  that 
make  for  life  and  not  death,  for  sanity  and 
not  excess. 

Hinton  gives  a  very  good  instance  in  his 
private  manuscripts  of  the  pitiful  inversion 
the  natural  joy  in  natural  things  can 
undergo. 

A  man  came  to  him  once  in  great  distress 
because  he  thought  he  had  hurt  the  purity 
of  mind  of  his  wife  by  persuading  her  to 
have  a  bath  with  her  baby  in  his  presence. 
They  had  all  enjoyed  it  like  children,  till 
the  false  idea  came  to  the  man,  the  idea  of 
impurity.  He  could  not  see,  even  when 
Hinton  pointed  it  out  to  him,  that  the  only 
demoralising  thing  in  the  situation  was  his 
feeling  of  demoralisation.     It  was   as  if  a 

9 


128     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

flower  felt  it  a  sin  to  shake  in  the  wind  or 
open  to  the  sun.     A  father  and  mother  and 
child  being  joyously  and  intimately  one,  a 
sin !     It  makes  one  wonder    what   sort   of 
training   in   purity   ought   to   follow   these 
stuffy  misconceptions  of  the  degradation  of 
the  sweet,  clean  senses  !    The  pathetic  thing 
was  that  the  man  seemed  to  despise  his  wife 
for  what  he  had  asked  her  to  do.     This  so 
often  happens  under  our  false  conceptions 
of  purity  and  pleasure,  where  mock  modesty 
and    insincerity    on    a    woman's   part   and 
conscious  scheming  on  the  man's  part  take 
the  place  of  natural  impulses  and   mystic 
forces.     Our  righteousness,  in  these  matters, 
must  not  be  as  filthy  rags.     As  the  author 
of   The  Modern  Mystic's  Way  says   truly, 
"  Love  and   worship    body   and   soul   with 
soul  and  body  and  you  may  do  what  you 
like  and  love  body  as  passionately  as  soul." 
In  other  words,  we  are  to  make  ourselves 
such  within,  that  goodness  shall  not  lead  to 
evil  results. 


MYSTERY   OF   PLEASURE     129 

Hinton  realised,  quite  as  much  as 
Nietzsche  did,  that  it  is  not  only  our 
badness  that  is  bad,  but  our  goodness  in 
these  matters.  Hinton  emphatically  de- 
clares that  the  wisdom  which  scorns  sense 
is  folly,  and  the  purity  which  puts  sense 
aside  and  wants  to  dwell  above  it  is  not 
purity,  but  impurity.  The  great  secret  is 
surely  not  to  want  to  live  above  any  one 
beautiful  function  or  feeling  we  have,  but 
in  unity  with  it  and  with  the  larger  self, 
which  is,  or  should  be,  at  one  with  the 
smaller  self.  It  is  not  less  life  and  joy  and 
pleasure  we  want,  but  more ;  and  we  must 
try  to  dissolve  our  discords  into  harmonies 
with  respect  to  these  matters.  It  is  not  an 
increase  in  the  pitiable  army  of  the  underfed, 
anaemic,  miscalled  spiritual  men  and  women 
we  need,  but  an  increase  in  the  well- 
nourished,  clean,  robust,  mystic,  and  joyous 
lovers  of  the  world  who  are  no  more  afraid 
of  their  healthy  bodily  functions  than  of 
the  pain  and  loss  and  development  which 


130     THREE    MODERN   SEERS 

precede  and  follow  all  the  great  growths  of 
the  heart  and  soul. 

Many  people  think  that  there  is  no  choice 
between  badness  in  pleasure  and  goodness 
in  restraint.  Everything  depends  on  the 
point  of  view. 

"  Suppose,"  says  Hinton,  "  because  they  are  so 
delicious  to  eat,  that  pineapples  were  forbidden  to 
be  seen  except  in  pictures,  and  even  in  them  there 
was  a  sort  of  doubtful  feeling.  Suppose  no  one 
might  have  a  sight  of  pineapples  unless  he  were 
rich  enough  to  buy  one  for  his  own  particular  eating. 
The  sight  and  the  eating  being  so  joined  together, 
should  we  not  have  made  life  in  respect  to  pine- 
apples, and  our  gluttony  about  them,  as  impure  and 
wretched  as  it  is  now  about  women  and  pleasure? 
Suppose  some  one  awoke  to  the  fallacy  about  pine- 
apples. What  then  ?  Should  we  go  on  submitting 
to  the  idiotic  feeling  ?  No.  We  should  not  get 
rid  of  pineapples,  but  we  should  change  our  feeling 
about  them." 

Hinton  says  that,  just  in  the  same  way, 
when  women  have  faced  some  things  they 
must  be  brave  enough  to  realise  what  it 
is  that  wants  taking  away ;  not  the  reality, 


MYSTERY   OF   PLEASURE     131 

but  the  pretence.  Women,  he  says,  must 
get  rid  of  the  feeling  which  makes  them 
say,  "  Let  any  hypocrisy  and  mischief  be, 
but  no  shock  or  effort  must  come  to  me." 
Men  also  must  get  cleaner  hearts  and 
renewed  spirits  before  either  men  or  women 
can  dream  truly  or  act  truly  about  those 
passionate  mystic  pleasures  which  are  able 
to  cleanse  and  strengthen  and  ought  never 
to  degrade  or  weaken  our  souls.  As 
Hinton  truly  declares,  nothing  can  give  us 
a  true  heaven  again  but  this  giving  of  a 
true  earth  to  us  again,  and  this  giving  of 
earth  to  us,  in  the  sense  he  means,  is 
not  the  restraint  of  impure  pleasures  and 
passions,  or  an  excess  of  sensuality,  but  a 
new  vision  of  the  purity  of  pure  passions 
and  pure  pleasures. 

Hinton  recognises  what  so  many  moralists 
fail  to  see,  that  no  pleasure  can  possibly 
degrade  a  man  not  already  degraded  by 
acting  for  himself.  This  acting  for  self 
is  what  Hinton  condemns  all  through  his 


132     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

philosophy.  He  believes  that  it  is  at  the 
root  of  all  our  distorted  virtues  and  false 
sins.  In  a  right,  he  says,  there  cannot  be 
a  wrong.  The  wrong  is  in  us,  in  our 
attitude.  All  pleasure  taken  merely  for 
self  degrades.  It  is  the  taking  for  self 
that  degrades  it,  not  the  thing  taken. 

Absolute  absorption  in  anything  is  in- 
harmonious and  so  wrong.  It  is  a  mistake 
to  think  that  goodness  consists  in  putting 
away  pleasure.  Pleasure  is  not  only  not 
wrong  in  itself,  but  a  right  in  itself;  yet  a 
man  centring  his  life  wholly  round  pleasure 
is  wrong,  as  even  work  is  wrong  if  it 
absorbs  all  the  faculties  and  thoughts  of  a 
man.  The  casting  out  of  self,  to  Hinton, 
means,  not  a  sinking  of  individuality  and 
the  cultivation  of  mock  heroism,  but  a 
defining  of  real  individuality  and  a  realisa- 
tion of  others'  needs  so  that  impulses  move 
in  the  direction  of  service,  not  only  for 
others  but  for  self. 

This  is  a  very  important  point  in  Hinton's 


MYSTERY   OF   PLEASURE     133 

ethics.  Hinton  would  say,  Love  your 
neighbour  as  yourself,  because  you  realise 
through  your  own  needs  and  development 
what  are  your  neighbour's  needs.  Neither 
a  thwarted,  crushed  self  nor  a  thwarted, 
crushed  neighbour  is  a  fulfilling  of  the  law 
of  service,  as  Hinton  understood  service 
or  love.  In  these  matters  we  are  not  to 
cast  out  self  in  a  mock  heroism  or  forced 
sacrifice,  any  more  than  in  service  or  love 
we  are  to  cast  out  sense.  We  are  to 
fulfil  the  demands  of  a  real  self  and  a  sane 
service  in  order  to  get  rid  of  a  false  self 
and  an  artificial  service. 

It  is  the  having  self  alone,  apart  from 
service,  which  is  the  stupid  thing,  because 
then  the  self  is  false,  even  to  itself.  It 
is  always  to  be  the  self  for  and  in  with 
others  from  the  first.  Not  pleasure  first, 
but  service  and  good  first,  and  then  all  the 
pleasure  it  is  possible  to  have.  Self-virtue 
is  bound  to  bring  self-pleasure  in  its  train. 
This   is  what  people  cannot  and  will   not 


134     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

see.  The  only  good  is  to  desire  good ;  and 
good  thoughts,  as  Hinton  again  and  again 
puts  it,  are  thoughts  for  service. 

The  putting  away  pleasure,  he  saw  clearly, 
is  a  necessary  result  of  pursuing  pleasure. 
Do  not  pursue  pleasure,  says  Hinton.  Do 
not  put  it  away  either.  Keep  the  law  of  love 
or  service  in  your  heart,  and  the  servants 
of  true  pleasure,  joy  and  purity,  will  come 
along  unbidden.  Pleasure  is  only  a  tyrant 
when  it  is  pursued.  Be  its  slave,  and  it 
debases  you.  Be  free  of  it  and  yet  welcome 
it  when  it  comes,  and  you  know  the  true 
joy  of  living.  To  insist,  says  this  seer,  on 
refusing  good  because  it  is  pleasure  binds 
most  cruelly,  most  fatally,  most  deeply,  and 
with  hardest  pangs  to  be  loosed,  this  yoke 
of  pleasure  on  the  soul.  It  is  the  utmost 
depth  of  bondage  to  it.  But  get  rid  of  the 
search  for  pleasure,  and  in  fact  the  search 
for  anything,  and  then  take  all  joy  as  it 
comes  along.  When  we  have  once  realised 
that  goodness  and  pleasure  are  not  foes  but 


MYSTERY   OF   PLEASURE     135 

allies,  we  are  on  the  way  to  understanding, 
not  only  Hinton's  meaning,  but  earth's 
meaning. 

"  Man,"  says  Hinton,  "  cannot  hear  the  voice  of 
good  when  it  calls  in  the  tone  of  pleasure.  His  ears 
are  deafened  to  that  sound,  and  though  service  play 
to  him  upon  an  instrument  of  joy,  with  ever  such 
charms,  his  dull  feet  will  not  move.'" 

There  are  two  ways,  according  to  Hinton, 
in  which  pleasure  may  be  treated.  Let 
all  pleasures  be  counted  evil  unless  some- 
thing makes  them  good,  or  let  all  be 
counted  good  unless  something  makes  them 
evil.  Pleasure  is  good  if  made  good,  bad 
if  made  bad ;  but  pleasure  in  itself  is  not 
an  evil,  but  a  good  thing. 

There  are  two  deliverances  in  this  matter 
of  pleasure — deliverance  from  the  rule  of  self 
and  deliverance  from  fear.  We  must  in- 
dividually face  this  question  of  pleasure  by 
marching  up  to  it,  looking  it  in  the  face  in 
order  to  know  the  difference  between  realities 
and  conventions,  and  then  simply  set  about 


136     THREE    MODERN   SEERS 

our  work  with  courage  and  simplicity.  In- 
sight soon  comes  to  us  if  we  are  true  and 
fearless.  However  traditionalised  we  are, 
sooner  or  later  we  must  face  this  question 
of  pleasure.  Is  not  heaven  itself  supposed 
to  be  pleasure  ?  If  we  are  to  enter  there, 
even  according  to  dogmatic  belief,  we  must 
surely  learn  here  not  to  be  afraid  of  pleasure, 
or  we  may,  when  we  reach  the  other  side, 
find  ourselves  like  cripples  in  a  dancing-hall, 
a  little  out  of  place.  Was  not  that  a  wise 
man,  demands  Hintoi),  who  asked,  "  Why 
should  the  devil  have  all  the  best  tunes  ?  " 
and  he  gave  to  God's  service  all  the  best 
music  he  could  find. 

Pleasure  is  good,  but  only  utterly  good 
when  it  is  merged  in  love  or  service  ;  and  we 
must  always  bear  in  mind  that  service  cannot 
rule  over  pleasure  if  we  make  it  second  to 
anything.  Make  love,  real  love,  rule  and 
follow  any  pleasure  you  like,  because  then 
you  cannot  make  human  beings  a  mere 
means  to  your  private  pleasure  or  end,  but 


MYSTERY    OF   PLEASURE     137 

must  first  allow  them  to  be  ends  in  them- 
selves, as  Kant  so  simply  sums  up  these 
intricate  ethics  for  us.  Service  must  rule 
first.  If  not,  we  have  thrown  away  our 
safeguard,  as  Hinton  says,  and  given  our 
foes  dominion  over  us.  We  must  be  slaves 
to  no  one,  and  to  nothing,  and  servants  of 
nothing  but  service  ;  and  by  service  Hinton 
always  means  love  in  its  best  and  sanest 
sense,  as  Christ  and  Buddha  interpret  love. 

Nothing  else  can  give  the  passion,  the 
courage,  the  vitality  we  need  for  daily  in- 
spiration and  usefulness.  Service  or  love  is 
the  only  power  pleasure  will  obey.  That 
is,  nothing  else  can  make  the  giving  up  of 
pleasure  itself  a  pleasure.  Pain  and  pleasure 
alike  are  but  incidents ;  they  are  both  not 
causes,  but  effects.  Pleasure  is  not  a  thing, 
not  any  action  or  process  even.  It  is  the 
gratifying  of  a  tendency  or  impulse.  Any 
tendency  made  strong  enough  to  be  a  passion 
gives  pleasure.  That  is  the  natural  law. 
The  passion  or  tendency  arises  from  a  need, 


138     THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

the  good  of  that  need  arises  from  the  fact 
that  the  need  itself  is,  or  should  be,  for 
service.  So  pleasure  is  an  incident,  not  an 
end.  The  tendencies  express  the  needs,  and 
the  fulfilling  of  the  needs  is  pleasure.  As 
Hinton  says  : 

"  We  cannot  even  eat  our  dinners  rightly,  cannot 
have  our  relations  right  to  mere  dead  flesh  of  beast 
and  bird  and  roots  of  the  earth,  till  our  thoughts 
are  off  pleasure  as  a  first  cause.1, 

Hinton  knew  a  great  secret.  It  is  not 
enough  to  restrain  passion.  The  passion 
itself  must  be  right.  It  is  a  mistake  to 
imagine  that  in  any  world  restraint  of 
passion  would  suffice  for  virtue.  The 
people  who  would  spiritualise  passion  must 
first  humanise  it.  The  best-meaning  people 
often  make  a  mistake  in  this  matter,  and  it 
is  from  this  wrong  conception  that  they 
inculcate  into  young  healthy  creatures  a  code 
of  morality  that  both  their  natural  and 
mystic  intuitions  repudiate.  The  child  is 
often  nearer  the  seer  than  the  rigid  moralist 


MYSTERY   OF   PLEASURE     139 

in  these  matters.  Not  restraint,  then,  but 
the  condition  in  which  restraint  is  no  more 
called  for,  is  the  only  true  good. 

"  Let  pleasure,"  says  Hinton,  "  be  no  more  a  power 
to  ruin  and  destroy.  Learn  to  be  able  to  use  it  and 
not  to  be  crushed  by  it ;  to  be  able  to  stand  up  erect 
as  men  even  in  face  of  it,  and  so  be  able  to  pursue 
service  in  the  midst  of  pleasure." 

"  What  right  have  we  ? "  asks  Hinton, 
"  to  assume  that  a  pleasure  is  not  a  duty  ?  " 
It  is  sad  to  realise  how  much  needless 
suffering  and  needless  sense  of  sin  come 
about  through  a  wrong  conception  of  plea- 
sure. Nowhere  is  this  seen  more  pitiably 
than  in  the  relations  of  the  sexes ;  and  this 
is  what  Hinton  realised  towards  the  end  of 
his  life  more  than  almost  anything  else. 

Sexual  love,  to  Hinton,  was  a  sacrament, 
which  it  was  a  sin  to  withhold  and  a  sin 
to  profane.  Sexual  love  implies,  to  many 
minds,  a  mere  physical  relationship,  and  so 
confusion  naturally  arises  between  the  ideas 
of  a  man  like  Hinton  and  the  interpretation 


140     THREE    MODERN   SEERS 

of  these   same  ideas  by   one  who  has  the 
average   conception   of  love   and   morality. 
The   over-emphatic    and   therefore    untrue 
emphasis  of  the  physical,  insisted  upon  by 
sexual  gluttons,  was  to  Hinton  a  shocking 
and  stupid  way  of  approaching  what  was, 
to  him,   the   most   beautiful   and   mystical 
thing  with    which    we    have    to    reckon — 
the  absolute  need  of  a  man  for  a  woman 
for    his    complement    of   body    and    soul ; 
and  the  woman's  equally  imperative  need, 
her  need  of  man's  need  of  her,  as  Heine 
puts   it.     To  treat  this  great  spiritual  fact 
only   from    the    bodily    side    was,    Hinton 
declared,  as  if,  in  listening  to  Sarasate  play- 
ing  the   violin,    we   were   always   thinking 
about   the    cat's   bowels    and    horses'  tails 
used  to  produce  the  instrument.     Modern 
science   has   to  be  thanked  for   knowledge 
of  actual   physical   facts    in   these   matters 
of  sex,  for  all  facts  are  important  enough 
in  this   question,   around   which   are   more 
traditions   and   muddle-headedness   than  in 


MYSTERY    OF   PLEASURE     141 

anything  else.  Science,  however,  has  also 
unfortunately  helped  a  little  in  the  attitude 
many  still  retain,  the  attitude  of  too  much 
emphasis  on  the  mere  bodily  function  in- 
stead of  on  its  mystical  inwardness. 

Hinton's  attitude,  when  facing  this  dif- 
ficult problem,  is  the  attitude  of  one  seeing 
and  believing  in  the  mysticism,  the  purity, 
the  beauty,  and  the  force  for  good  in  sex,  as 
Nature  and  the  great  Spirit  in  and  beyond 
Nature  mean  sex  to  be.  Neither  Nature 
nor  Nature's  God  means  it  to  be  the  dull, 
stuffy,  gluttonous,  absorbing,  jealous,  and 
ugly  thing  it  is  to  many  people.  "  The 
embracing  of  a  woman  is  the  most  spiritual 
of  all  things,"  said  Hinton ;  and  he  literally 
meant  what  he  said.  To  the  man  who  has 
never  had  that  utter  mystic  bewilderment 
and  abandonment,  to  be  found  only  by  the 
very  law  of  its  nature  in  clean  livers  and 
true  lovers,  the  statement  made  by  Hinton 
only  represents  an  orgy  of  intemperate 
gluttony  and  mere  bodily  sensation. 


142     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

Love's  laws  are  tragically  made  to  work  out 
their  cause  and  effect.  In  this,  as  in  other 
regions,  one  cannot  gather  figs  from  thistles, 
nor  serenity,  peace,  and  beauty  from  debauch. 
Sowing  and  reaping  in  this  love  question 
are  one.  The  means  to  a  great  spiritual 
fulfilment  through  a  physical  function  has 
passed  beyond  the  primitive  needs  of  an 
ape  or  a  tiger,  and  we  are  on  the  threshold 
of  the  greatest  revolution  the  world  has 
ever  seen — the  revolution  of  love.  Love 
was  once  as  far  away  from  its  own  kingdom 
of  beauty  as  a  stage-coach  from  wireless 
telegraphy.  Wonders  are  ahead  of  us  in 
these  matters,  and,  though  we  may  eagerly 
absorb  the  newer  ideal,  we  must  apply 
Edward  Carpenter's  words  in  earnest,  "  Do 
not  hurry ;  have  faith." 

The  fact  that  pleasure  is,  or  should  be,  an 
essential  part  of  love,  confuses  the  tradition- 
alised  mind,  which  cannot  rid  itself  of  the 
association  of  ascetic  ideals  or  licentious  ex- 
cess in  this  matter  of  love  and  joy.     Love, 


MYSTERY   OF   PLEASURE     143 

real  love,  can  dispense  with  both  restraint 
and  excess,  because  in  a  true  love  and  a  full 
freedom  temperance  and  joy  are  necessary 
parts.  The  true  lover  is  neither  covetous 
of  what  he  loves  nor  afraid  of  his  own 
feelings.  It  was  a  plea  for  this  joy  and 
temperance  in  love  that  Hinton  always 
put  forward.  He  saw  plainly  that  "  lust 
is  that  distortion  of  one  or  some  desires 
that  comes  by  absence  of  desires  that  ought 
to  be  present."  He  wanted  people  to 
realise  that  joy  is  not  of  necessity  a  greedy 
absorption,  and  that  pleasure,  rightly  under- 
stood, here  and  now,  is  one  of  the  means 
towards  understanding  eternal  truths. 

It  is  no  use  waiting  for  the  mere  accident 
of  death  to  become  pure.  We  may  be  very 
certain  that  the  other  side  of  the  opaque 
veil  will  not  remodel  us  at  a  bound.  It  is 
we  who  have  to  remodel  ourselves  here, 
and  as  soon  as  we  realise  what  remodelling 
means  we  must  have  the  courage  to  begin. 
What  we  have  failed  to  learn  here  we  shall 

10 


144     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

certainly  have  to  learn  there.  It  will  not 
do  to  skip  pages  in  one  life,  thinking  we 
can  understand  the  following  chapter  in 
the  next.  They  hang  together.  We  shall 
continue  struggling,  whether  it  is  this  side 
or  the  other,  till  we  have  attained.  The 
lesson  we  moderns  have  to  learn  about  love 
is  to  get  rid  of  both  the  leering  thought 
of  mere  pleasure  in  and  for  itself  and  also 
to  get  rid  of  an  angry,  incensed  repulsion 
about  the  physical  side  of  love,  both  attitudes 
proving  the  same  thing — that  our  thought  is 
on  mere  pleasure  for  its  own  sake,  and  not 
on  pleasure  as  it  is  wedded  to  service. 

Brutal  bestiality  is  often  the  offspring  of 
mock  goodness,  and  all  the  meanness  and 
absorption  of  possession  in  persons,  in  or  out 
of  legal  bonds,  must  go,  as  feudalism  has 
gone.  It  is  out  of  hell  into  paradise  we  are 
to  get  in  this  matter,  and  only  true  lovers 
can  lead  the  way.  Nature  has  made  good 
and  pleasure  one  in  the  marriage  relation, 
but  it  is  only  a  type  of  all  her  being ;  it  is 


MYSTERY   OF   PLEASURE     145 

but  the  chief  and  culminating  instance,  and 
so  evidently  the  one  in  which  her  chief  work 
is  done.  Nature  asks  the  question,  which 
shall  goodness  mean  to  you  ?  Refusing 
pleasure  and  so  thinking  of  yourself,  or  ful- 
filling absolutely  the  condition  of  it  so  that 
you  need  think  of  others  only  ?  Fulfilling 
the  conditions  is  an  inside  thing,  a  thing  of 
the  heart.  The  using  any  law,  a  law  of 
Nature,  against  service  is  the  abusing  of  it. 
The  question  of  gluttony  and  food  illus- 
trates this  matter.  Pleasure  in  eating  food 
aids  digestion,  is  natural  and  right,  and 
should  be  almost  unconscious.  The  con- 
scious element  in  eating  should  be  as  to 
what  is  nourishing  in  order  to  make  the 
human  being  strong  and  fit  for  work  and 
service  for  self  and  others. 

As  Hinton  points  out,  there  is  no  eating 
perfectly  for  service  except  by  letting  pleasure 
guide  the  eating.  In  this,  as  in  sexual  love, 
instead  of  pleasure  being  a  thing  to  get  rid 
of,  it  should  be  a  guide.     We  confound  mere 


146     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

pleasant  sensations  with  pleasure.  Pleasure 
is  the  play  of  passion,  and  varies  constantly. 
Let  the  passion  be  for  service  and  what 
harm  can  the  pleasure  do  ?  That  is  the 
nature  harmony  in  the  matter  of  eating. 
The  moment  the  mind  is  on  the  mere 
sensation  of  tickling  the  palate,  and  good 
wholesome  food  is  felt  to  be  insipid,  and 
only  spicy,  stimulating  and  costly  food  is 
craved,  the  appetite  has  gone  from  service 
lines  to  gluttony  lines,  and  the  real  evil 
in  this  matter  has  crept  in.  Hunger  is 
good,  pleasure  in  satisfying  hunger  is  good  ; 
gluttony  is  dull  and  inharmonious. 

Now,  what  the  whole  world  more  or  less 
recognises  about  eating,  Hinton  vividly 
realised  about  the  sexual  appetite.  Sex, 
Hinton  declares,  is  the  gluttony  region  of 
our  life,  and  so  creates  artificial  needs  and 
artificial  rules.  What  to  him  was  horrid 
and  filthy  was  letting  the  thought  of  mere 
selfishness  come  in  at  all  in  this  matter. 
He  saw  how  we  degrade  this  sex  hunger 


MYSTERY   OF   PLEASURE     147 

by  lust  and  selfishness.  To  Hinton,  as  to 
all  real  lovers,  this  mystieal  love  is  a  thing 
nobler  than  poetry,  lovelier  than  flowers, 
even  more  ravishing  than  music.  The 
purest  woman  I  have  ever  known  said 
once  to  me,  "  Ah !  surely !  love  is  like 
music,  it  vibrates,  satisfies,  and  uplifts  just 
as  Beethoven  does."  Hinton,  the  pure 
man,  said  : 

"  The  person  who  thinks  embracing  a  woman 
more  low  and  sensual  than  music  has  made  it 
brutal.  Nothing  can  degrade  save  what  is  in  the 
soul." 

Hinton,  the  mystic,  knew  that  the  dew 
of  heaven  is  not  a  purer  thing  in  its  essence 
than  this  love  that,  once  twisted  round  self, 
becomes  a  pollution.  The  corruption,  if 
any  there  be,  is  in  us  and  not  in  it.  All 
other  things,  as  he  says,  will  bear  being 
twisted  round  self  with  less  pollution  than 
will  this,  which  is,  in  its  essence,  the  purest 
of  them  all.  To  Hinton,  sexual  love  meant 
woman's  good,  her  life,  and  to  him  this  is 


148     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

just  what  made  it  pure.  He  realised  that 
it  was  a  means  to  her  health  of  body, 
sanity  of  mind,  the  intensest  devotion  and 
sacrifice,  the  very  fullest  development  of  her 
life,  with  all  the  pleasure  to  her  of  giving, 
both  to  her  lover  and  again  to  her  child. 
The  means  towards  that  which  should  call 
forth  the  highest  elements  alike  in  her  and 
in  man,  this,  Hinton  could  not,  as  doctor 
and  mystic,  find  degrading.  He  could  only 
see  the  wonder  and  glory  of  it,  and  his  heart 
was  torn  as  he  realised  more  and  more  what 
a  mockery  of  the  reality  our  little  trite, 
traditionalised  domestic  relationships  often 
are  at  their  very  best. 

"  Is  it  more  shame  or  wonder,11  he  asks,  "  that  of 
all  the  thoughts  man  has  had  respecting  his  passion 
for  woman  and  joy  in  her,  he  has  never  had  the 
thought  of  its  good  for  her  ?  " 

Instead  of  looking  on  this  sexual  love 
as  a  mere  means  to  his  pleasure  and 
enjoyment,  he  ought  to  look  at  it  as 
the     means     of    her     utmost     good,     her 


MYSTERY  OF   PLEASURE     149 

fulfilment.  Hinton  saw  that  the  taint  of 
man's  ordinary  attitude  to  women  and  to 
pleasure  pollutes  our  very  piety,  for  con- 
scious hypocrisy  and  sexual  selfishness  may 
be  greater  sins  against  the  Holy  Spirit  than 
many  others  put  to  that  account.  When  a 
man  is  only  thinking  of  his  own  sexual 
sensations  while  he  imagines  that  he  is 
loving  a  woman,  it  is,  as  Hinton  points  out, 
as  if  a  person  were  called  to  another  in  his 
utmost  need  in  sickness  and  could  think  of 
nothing  but  the  pleasure  of  the  journey 
there. 

According  to  Hinton,  women  must  be 
literally  worshipped  in  spirit  before  the 
bodily  enjoyment  can  be  true  to  service. 
Their  body  is  the  precious  instrument  for 
producing  the  best  results  for  the  race. 
Our  sweet,  natural  wants  are  Nature's  har- 
monies, but  our  excessive,  stimulated  needs 
are  our  own,  and  are  often  discords.  Hunger 
is  a  natural  need ;  gluttony  an  unnatural 
excess   of  the   need.      Drinking  is  another 


150     THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

real  need  ;  drunkenness  the  debauch  of  that 
need.  Physical  love  is  a  righteous  need ; 
lust  its  dull  slave.  Unnatural  restraint 
follows  unnatural  desire.  What  remedy  is 
there  for  restraint,  according  to  Hinton  ? 
Only  one.  That  a  man  should  not  need 
restraint,  because  his  senses  are  clean  and 
sweet,  and  so  will  easily  follow  his  needs, 
and  not  his  excesses.  The  necessity  of 
putting  away  pleasure,  then,  is  merely  the 
result  of  pursuing  it. 

"  When  the  question  of  his  bodily  pleasure,11  says 
Hinton,  "has  been  made  to  determine  everything, 
how  should  man's  thoughts  go  to  anything  but  the 
question  of  his  bodily  pleasure  ?  r 

Hinton  always  proves  in  these  matters 
how  the  letter  killeth.  Self-righteousness 
and  putting  purity  as  a  thing  of  the  flesh 
he  knew  to  be  nearly  always  one. 

A  man  who  declared  again  and  again,  as 
Hinton  did,  that  sexual  pleasure,  rightly 
understood,  is  the  most  spiritual  thing, 
sublimer,  purer,  more  noble  and  ennobling 


MYSTERY   OF   PLEASURE     151 

than  any  prayer  that  ever  was  or  ever  will 
be  uttered,  should  be  listened  to  in  this 
matter.  Perhaps  his  statement  was  an  ex- 
aggeration, but  the  exaggeration  is  better  on 
the  cleaner  side  than  the  fouler  one.  The 
struggle  between  woman's  needs  and  the 
self  in  man  would  soon  be  at  an  end  if  man 
could  once  realise  that  if  his  pleasure  is  his 
first  thought  he  is  far  away,  not  only  from 
the  kingdom  of  heaven,  but  from  the 
realisation  of  woman.  Her  need  is  truly 
man's  need  of  her,  but  no  woman  gives 
herself  unreservedly  except  to  one  who 
loves  her  beyond  herself  and  himself.  She 
cannot,  because  of  the  nature  of  the  re- 
lationship. This  is  the  true  lover's  secret, 
and  also  the  solution  of  this  vexed  question 
of  the  mystery  of  pleasure  in  sexual  rela- 
tionships. 

Sex,  in  the  sense  Hinton  realised  it,  is 
not  a  question  of  the  senses  only,  but  a 
matter  of  affinity  which  neither  this  world 
nor    thousands    of    worlds    can   impair   or 


152     THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

destroy,  if  lovers  are  true  to  their  vision  and 
to  the  inner  laws  of  mystical  marriage. 

It  is,  as  Hinton  implies  again  and  again, 
no  use  fighting  a  spiritual  power  as  if  it 
were  a  mere  thing  of  the  flesh.  We  might 
as  well  try  to  bind  the  wind  with  chains. 
Not  to  have  love  was  the  only  damnation 
to  Hinton.  Attain  purity  of  heart,  was  his 
cry,  then  you  will  see,  not  only  woman  as 
God  sees  her,  but  woman  as  God  meant  her 
to  be.  When  purity  is  attained  it  is  a 
stable  condition,  not  capable  of  being 
affected  by  external  conditions.  "  Be  such 
a  one  that  you  will  be  able  to  obey  your 
impulses,"  he  repeats  again  and  again. 

Many  of  us  follow  St.  Paul  in  these 
matters,  and  St.  Paul  had  indeed  a  thorn 
in  his  flesh  and  in  his  soul,  and  he  vented 
his  pain  in  many  caustic  sayings  against 
the  deliciousness  of  sex.  His  followers  are 
many,  and  the  followers  of  Christ  few. 
He,  gentle  to  little  children,  loving  the 
Magdalene,  not  as  a  pitiable  outcast,  but  as 


MYSTERY   OF   PLEASURE     153 

one  realising  His  conception  of  love  as  a 
giving  up  of  all  things,  said  (and  let  all  good 
people  note  this  well)  "I  am  come  that  they 
might  have  life,  and  that  they  might  have  it 
more  abundantly." 


SELECTED  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

James  Hinton.  Man  and  his  Dwe/ling-Place.     1869. 

New  editions  in  1861  and  1872. 
„  „  Life  in  Nature.     1862. 

„  „  The  Mystery  of  Pain.     1866. 

„  ,,  The  Place  of  the  Physician.     1876. 

,,  ,,  Chapters    on    the  Art  of  Thinking,  and 

other  Essays.  Edited  by  C.  H.  Hinton. 

1879. 
„  ,,  Philosophy    and    Religion.       Selections 

from  Manuscripts.    Edited  by  Caroline 

H addon.     1881. 
„  „  The   Lawbreaker.     Edited   by  Margaret 

Hinton,    with    an     Introduction     by 

Havelock  Ellis.     1884. 
Ellice  Hopkins.         Life  and  Letters  of  James  Hinton.     1878. 
Caroline  Haddon.     The  Larger  Life.     Studies   in  Hinton's 

Ethics.     1886. 


ru 


Jr/4       J\l  U^Zihit 


CHAPTER  V 

NIETZSCHE    AND    MORALS 


CHAPTER  V 

NIETZSCHE   AND    MORALS 

Nietzsche  a  breaker  of  standard  moral  values— Mere 
morality  valueless— Individuality  the  first  thing 
to  attain— Nietzsche  a  tonic— Views  on  sin  and 
suffering— Antagonism  to  sympathy — Nietzsche's 
views  on  women- His  attitude  to  Christianity. 

Nietzsche,  as  he  himself  expresses  it,  is  a 
breaker  of  standard  values.  He  seeks  to 
draw  people  from  the  herd.  This  is  to 
court  misinterpretation  and  crucifixion. 
The  good,  the  just,  and  the  orthodox  make 
a  hue-and-cry  when  a  prophet  has  a  new 
word  for  the  same  old  religion  and  morality  ; 
but  when  he  asks  the  good,  the  just,  and  the 
moral  to  re-value  their  own  virtues,  when 
he  calls  on  them  to  re-value  their  values 
and  to  weigh  their  bad  goodness  in  the 
balance  with  their  good  badness,  as  it  were, 
they   naturally   rub    their    eyes.      Neither 

157 


158     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

Christianity  nor  paganism  fits  this  man's 
philosophy,  and  it  always  seems  dangerous 
to  the  crowd  to  accept  nameless  ideals. 

What  does  Nietzsche  offer  as  a  solution  to 
some  of  the  problems  which  beset  thinking 
people  ?  So  much  of  his  writing  is  obscure 
and  apparently  contradictory  that  it  is  very 
difficult  to  find  out  what  his  fundamental 
aim  is.  An  orthodox  Christian,  a  narrow 
moralist,  indeed  even  a  free  thinker,  reading 
his  books  may  well  be  puzzled  and  some- 
what terrified  by  what  they  find ;  but, 
whatever  else  may  have  happened  to  them 
before  they  finish  his  pages,  they  will  have 
been  made  to  think  and  to  weigh  their 
virtues  and  their  vices  in  a  new  balance. 

"  Man,"  says  Nietzsche,  "  is  a  connecting  rope 
between  the  animal  and  the  over-man,  a  rope  over 
an  abyss.  What  is  great  in  man  is  that  he  is  a 
bridge  and  not  a  goal ;  what  can  be  loved  in  man  is 
that  he  is  a  transit  and  an  exit." 

Here  is  the  key  to  some  of  his  meaning. 
When  he  mocks,  it  is  at  the  crawling  under- 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     159 

man.  When  he  incites,  it  is  to  spur  the 
man  to  hasten  the  coming  of  the  over-man. 
As  monkey  is  to  man,  so  is  man  to  the  over- 
man, and  all  Nietzsche's  commandments  are 
to  further  the  advent  of  this  new  creation  or 
evolution.  In  doing  this,  he  breaks  down 
the  idols  of  traditional  Christianity  and  of 
morals  ruthlessly.  In  The  Dawn  of  Day  he 
says  that — 

"  man  has  connected  all  things  in  existence  with 
morals,  and  dressed  up  the  world  in  a  garb  of  ethical 
significance.  The  day  will  come  when  all  this  will  be 
utterly  valueless,  as  is  already,  in  our  days,  the  belief 
in  the  masculinity  or  femininity  of  the  sun." 

Looking  upon  morality  as  a  mere  obedi- 
ence to  customs,  he  feels  it  is  intrinsically, 
on  that  very  account,  valueless.  The  great 
thing  of  value,  he  implies,  is  the  absolute 
reality  of  a  man's  personal  vision,  whether  it 
be  moral,  Christian,  pagan,  or  even  vicious. 
Morality  always  declares  that  the  individual 
must  sacrifice  himself  to  the  commandment 
of  the  current  order  of  virtue.     Nietzsche 

11 


160    THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

would  sacrifice  the  current  morality  to  the 
inner  vision  of  the  man  wise,  sane,  and  single 
enough  to  have  a  vision.  According  to  him, 
the  free  man  is  often  called  immoral,  simply 
because  he  is  determined  in  everything  to 
depend  upon  this  inner  vision  and  not  upon 
observance. 

In  The  Dawn  of  Day,  Nietzsche  says 
truly  : 

"It  is  incalculable  how  much  suffering  just  the  rarer, 
choicer,  and  more  original  minds  must  have  under- 
gone in  the  course  of  history,  owing  to  their  ever 
being  looked  upon,  nay,  and  their  looking  upon 
themselves,  as  evil  and  dangerous.  Originality  of 
every  kind  has  acquired  a  bad  conscience  under  the 
supreme  rule  of  the  morality  of  custom,  and  up  to 
this  very  moment  the  heaven  of  the  best,  for  the  same 
reason,  appears  gloomier  than  it  needs  be." 

Nietzsche  ridicules  the  fear  man  has  of  his 
own  individuality  or  of  his  sweetest  and 
quietest  visions.  This  fear,  he  feels,  often 
makes  a  man,  in  order  to  escape  from  the 
subtle  demands  of  his  deepest  self,  rush  into 
a  restless  mania  of  work,  which  Nietzsche 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     161 

calls  "machinal  activity."  From  this  he  gets 
a  "  minute  joy."  Incessant  activity,  under 
the  name  of  work,  is  what  this  strong,  virile 
intellectualist  considers  a  mere  device  to 
prevent  dreams  and  reflection.  In  Human, 
all  too  Human,  he  says  : 

"It  is  the  misfortune  of  the  active  that  their  activity 
is  almost  always  somewhat  senseless.  The  active  roll 
like  a  stone  in  accordance  with  the  stupidity  of 
mechanics.  All  men  are  still  divided,  as  they  have 
ever  been,  into  bond  and  free.  Whoever  has  not 
two-thirds  of  the  day  to  himself  is  a  slave,  no  matter 
what  he  may  be  otherwise — statesman,  merchant, 
official,  or  scholar."11 

Nietzsche  is  dubious  about  the  "  blessings 
of  labour,"  unless,  like  asceticism,  it  is  under- 
taken for  a  very  definite  end. 

"  Against  any  kind  of  affliction,""  he  says,  in  T7ie 
Daion  of  Day,  "  or  mental  misery,  we  ought  to  try 
first  of  all  a  change  of  diet  and  hard  manual 
labour." 

"The  greatest  events,"  he  says  in  Zarathustra, 
"  are  not  our  loudest,  but  our  stillest  hours.  The 
world  doth  not  revolve  round  the  inventors  of  new 
noises,  but  round  the  inventors  of  new  values." 


162     THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

Nietzsche's  cry  to  us  is  still  to  re-value. 
He  calls  on  us  to  face  our  strenuousness  as 
well  as  our  sins,  to  find  out  the  true  worth  of 
all  our  endeavours,  to  introspect  and  decide 
what  we  are,  what  we  are  aiming  at,  and 
what  goal  we  have  before  us.  He  declares 
that  six  things  have  been  spoilt  through 
their  misuse  by  the  Church.  First  asce- 
ticism, then  fasting,  the  cloister,  the  festival 
or  orgy,  our  spontaneous  self,  and  death.  If 
we  truthfully  take  those  points  one  by  one 
and  wrestle  with  Nietzsche's  meaning  with 
regard  to  them,  we  shall  be  nearer  an  under- 
standing of  this  apparently  stern  iconoclast, 
and  certainly  nearer  to  a  comprehension  of 
our  own  souls. 

The  mere  moralist  and  sentimentalist 
will  put  down  much  of  Nietzsche's  teaching 
as  dangerous  or  insane.  To  assert  that 
Nietzsche  actually  went  mad,  is,  of  course,  a 
cheap  way  of  refuting  his  doctrines.  About 
his  insanity  one  is  inclined  to  believe  his  own 
words  in  The  Dawn  of  Day,  where  he  says 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     163 

that  in  olden  days,  when  insanity  appeared, 
a  grain  of  genius  and  wisdom,  something 
"divine,"  as  they  whispered  into  each  other's 
ears,  was  to  be  found.  If  Nietzsche's  visions 
and  thoughts  were  too  much  for  the  poor 
human  brain  which  carried  them,  let  us 
beware  how  we  judge  him,  and  only  pray 
for  a  mental  digestion  strong  enough  to 
choose  the  good  and  reject  the  evil  of  the 
message  he  has  left  us. 

Nietzsche  did  not  go  mad  because  he 
wrote  philosophy,  or  even  because  he  wrote 
against  Christianity,  any  more  than  Maupas- 
sant went  mad  because  he  wrote  novels. 
We  have  still  to  understand  insanity  before 
we  can  judge  it.  All  with  which  we  have 
to  concern  ourselves  is  to  see  to  it  that  we 
do  not  drive  our  rarer  and  more  sensitive 
brothers  to  the  edge  of  it  when  they  come 
with  a  new  message.  Crucifixion  is  not  the 
only  method  of  disposing  of  those  who  are 
pure  in  heart. 

According   to    Nietzsche's    philosophy   a 


164     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

man  must  never  sacrifice  the  greater  for 
the  less,  an  eternal  verity,  a  great  human 
instinct,  for  a  mere  code,  however  noble  that 
code  may  be.  Had  Domini,  in  Hichens's 
novel,  The  Garden  of  Allah,  been  a  follower 
of  Nietzsche,  she  would  not  have  crushed 
in  herself  feelings  more  eternal  than  all 
mere  moralities,  and  sent  back  the  man  she 
loved  to  live  a  lie  in  his  living  death.  His 
monkhood,  after  a  glance  at  the  eternal 
verities  with  Domini,  could  have  been  only 
a  tasteless  offering  to  his  God.  But,  given 
the  belief  in  a  rigid  code  of  morality,  neither 
Domini  nor  her  lover  could  have  acted 
differently. 

It  is,  however,  against  such  slavery  to 
duties  so  called,  to  conventions  and  to  re- 
ligious and  moral  brutalities,  which  crucify 
natural  and  mystical  instincts,  that  Nietzsche 
wages  war.  No  over-man,  he  seems  to 
argue,  can  evolve  from  a  hypnotised  or 
shackled  under-man.  Where  goodness  pro- 
ceeds from  an  exuberance  of  self,  and  not 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     165 

from  a  repression  of  self,  he  believes  in  it, 
but  he  is  very  hard  on  the  weaklings  who 
think  themselves  good  because  they  have 
lame  paws.     He  says  in  Zarathustra : 

"  Thou  shalt  strive  after  the  virtue  of  the  pillar. 
It  ever  getteth  more  beautiful  and  tender,  but  inside 
ever  harder  and  more  able  to  bear  the  load  the 
higher  it  ariseth." 

His  cry  to  us  is  to  get  rid  of  fear,  to 
face  evil,  to  re-value  it,  and  to  re-value 
goodness.  To  do  this  we  must  get  rid  of 
cowardice  and  of  half-gods.  It  is  a  big 
call,  and  few  dare  respond.  It  means 
high  flying  and  courage,  for,  to  use  his 
own  words,  "the  higher  a  man  flies,  the 
smaller  he  appears  to  the  crowd  beneath," 
and  we  all  know  that  the  crowd  beneath 
have  almost  superhuman  powers  to  arrest 
flight. 

In  declaring  that  Nietzsche  commands 
a  man  to  follow  his  own  inner  vision  it 
must  not  be  imagined  that  he  implies  laxity. 
Nietzsche,  virile  thinker  as  he   is,  is  in  a 


166     THREE    MODERN    SEERS 

very  real  sense  ascetic  ;  his  work  abounds 
with  calls  to  temperance  and  hardness. 
Asceticism  to  him  does  not  mean  a  slaying 
of  instincts  and  happiness.  He  takes  the 
word  in  its  literal  Greek  sense,  which 
means  to  exercise  oneself,  to  combat,  so 
that  in  this  sense  an  ascetic  means  an 
athlete. 

This  fact  must  always  be  borne  in  mind 
when  reading  Nietzsche,  because,  in  the 
ordinary  sense,  asceticism  means  a  hair-shirt 
and  actual  repression.  Nietzsche  defines 
chastity,  for  instance,  as  the  economy  of 
the  artist.  He  would  also  call  asceticism 
the  athleticism  of  the  strong  man ;  and 
strong  means  always  to  Nietzsche  the  con- 
trolled and,  therefore,  the  great  man.  In 
his  Genealogy  of  Morals  he  says  : 

"  My  highest  respect  to  the  ascetic  ideal  in  so 
far  as  it  is  honest,  so  long  as  it  believes  in  itself 
and  cuts  no  capers  for  us.  I  do  not  like  the  whited 
sepulchres  which  mimic  life,  agitators  dressed  up  as 
heroes  and  who  are  at  bottom  tragic  clowns  only." 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     167 

He  resents  the  "  enormous  forgery  in 
ideals,  these  best-distilled  waters  of  the 
spirit,"  but  towards  the  trained  athlete  in 
control  and  endurance,  who  is  simple  and 
single  in  his  endeavours  to  live  a  hard, 
forcible,  and  sincere  life  his  sympathy  goes 
out.  He  feels  that  the  true  ascetic  does 
not  suffer  senselessly.  He  wills  to  suffer 
and  even  seeks  for  suffering,  because  he 
knows  the  significance  behind  it.  Nietzsche 
feels  that,  though  asceticism  has  so  far  only 
brought  suffering  into  the  perspective  of 
guilt,  still,  that  point  of  view,  crude  as  it 
is,  has  redeemed  it  from  its  senselessness 
and  apparent  cruelty.  To  suffer  as  an 
atonement  is  a  higher  view  of  the  order 
of  things  than  the  conception  of  a  jealous 
and  angry  God  torturing  mankind  with  no 
definite  end  in  view. 

Nietzsche  is  a  tonic  like  quinine.  There 
is  no  sedative  quality  in  him.  He  braces 
and  fortifies.  As  a  protest  against  mere 
philanthropy  and  sentimental,  theoretic  love 


168     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

of  one's  neighbour,  his  philosophy  has  its 
value  in  an  age  somewhat  given  over  to 
forced  sacrifices  for  others  as  a  liberation 
of  one's  own  soul.  "  To  many  a  man  it  is 
not  right  to  give  thy  hand,  but  only  thy 
paw,  and  I  want  thy  paws  to  have  claws," 
is  quite  wholesome  advice  to  those  who, 
again  to  use  his  own  words,  are  not  on 
their  "  guard  against  the  assaults  of  their 
love.  The  lonesome  one  stretches  out  his 
hand  too  readily  to  him  whom  he  en- 
counters." 

His  clear  call  to  men  and  women,  then, 
is  a  very  individualistic  one.  In  fact,  it 
is  supreme  individualism  that  Nietzsche 
preaches  with  unflinching  sincerity,  a  sin- 
cerity which  spares  no  person  and  no  point 
of  view,  ancient  or  modern.  His  demand 
for  a  total  re-adjustment  of  moral  values 
is  for  the  individual  to  apply  to  his  own 
life.  His  cry  to  men  and  women  to  make 
themselves  as  shining  lights  or  precious 
jewels  by  building  up  and  beautifying  their 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     169 

own  characters  is  a  healthy  demand,  if  a 
one-sided  one.  In  these  days  of  universal 
panaceas  for  right  living  it  is  a  sane  voice 
which  cries,  "  Begin  reform  on  yourself — 
it  is  the  only  means  of  converting  your 
neighbour." 

His  gospel  may  seem  hard  and  almost 
unduly  intellectual  to  a  mere  ethical  senti- 
mentalist who  finds  it  easier  to  expound 
a  gospel  than  to  attempt  to  live  it.  In 
these  days  of  mystic  gropings  and  socialistic 
materialisms  it  is  good  to  listen  to  the 
dictates  of  an  egoist  who  cries : 

"  Be  hard,  learn  to  suffer  with  hardness,  ignore 
mere  sacrifices,  and  evolve  yourself.  By  so  doing 
you  will  help  your  neighbour  better  than  by  offering 
to  carry  his  pack  on  your  shoulders." 

This  gospel  of  hardness  and  apparent 
selfishness  must,  of  course,  be  approached 
with  a  realisation  of  the  fact  that  Nietzsche 
is  one  of  those  whose  cry  of  warning  is 
chiefly  against  himself. 


170     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

Nietzsche,  from  all  the  evidence,  was  a 
man  of  very  sensitive  and  tender  nature, 
and  his  dread  of  where  this  might  lead  him 
accounts  for  an  over- vigorous  protest  against 
a  softness  and  sweetness  of  heart  and  soul 
for  which  the  casual  student  of  his  hard 
sayings  would  scarcely  credit  him.  Nietzsche 
is  not  a  prophet  of  the  soul  at  all.  One 
must  not  expect  the  deepest  word  from  him. 
Not  merely  is  he  devoid  of  what  George  Eliot 
called  "  other- worldliness,"  but  it  seems  to 
me  that  he  is  without  the  higher  wisdom. 
The  essential  wisdom  which  is  childlike 
in  faith  and  womanly  in  sympathy  is  lack- 
ing. He  is  a  man  of  large  intellectual 
ideals  and  courageous  aims,  a  virile  warrior 
of  the  intellect,  a  high-priest  of  culture 
and  self-control.  To  this  man  knowledge, 
to  use  his  own  words  in  his  Gay  Science, 
is  not — 

"  a  couch  of  repose,  or  the  way  to  a  couch  of 
repose,  or  an  entertainment,  or  an  idling.  For  me,11 
he  says,  "it  is  a  world  of  perils  and  triumphs,: in 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     171 

which  the  heroic  sentiments  also  have  their  arena 
and  dancing-ground.  Life  as  a  means  to  knowledge  ! 
With  this  principle  in  one's  heart  one  not  only 
can  be  brave,  but  can  even  live  joyfully  and  laugh 
joyfully.  And  who  could  understand  how  to  laugh 
well  and  live  well  who  did  not  first  of  all  understand 
war  and  triumph  well  ? " 

In  his   Will  to  Power  he  says : 

"  It  is  no  small  advantage  to  have  a  hundred 
swords  of  Damocles  hanging  over  one ;  that  way 
one  learns  to  dance,  and  so  one  achieves  freedom  of 
movement. " 

This  is  a  fine  trumpet-call  with  which 
to  take  up  life  with  more  than  Emersonian 
courage,  for  Emerson  has  a  warmer  word 
of  sure  comfort  for  us.  Nietzsche's  demand 
relies  on  the  heroic  quality  inherent  in  a 
man  simply  because  he  is  a  man.  He 
never  calls  on  us  to  subdue  our  flesh  or 
expand  our  spirit  for  the  mere  sake  of 
virtue.  He  is  not  sure  that  moralists  have 
not  been  smothering  their  morality  with 
their   own   maxims.      It  is   this   he   wants 


172    THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

A^each  one  of  us  to  find  out  by  being  quite 
true  to  our  inner  vision. 

To  study  Nietzsche  carefully  is  to  get  a 
virile,  intellectual,  masterful  record  of  a 
distinctly  modern  individuality.  He  has 
dared  to  face  what  morals  are  worth,  not 
because  he  feels  they  are  worthless,  but 
because  some  of  the  people  who  believe 
in  them  and  act  up  to  their  lights  show 
a  heaviness  of  heart  and  a  lethargy  of 
action  which  contrasts  feebly  with  the  daz- 
zling swiftness  and  energy  of  the  followers 
of  sin.  When  the  followers  of  morality 
have  a  shine  and  shimmer  of  joy  in  their 
deeds,  and  are  gay  under  their  accepted 
burdens,  and  take  suffering  and  illness  and 
death  as  their  goodly  heritage,  there  will 
be  no  need  for  a  second  Nietzsche  to  arisef 
to  ask  us  to  weigh  our  Christianity  and 
morality  in  the  balance.  The  drab,  pesti- 
lential self-sufficiency  of  many  so-called  good 
people  is  one  of  the  stumbling-blocks  to 
the  weaker  brethren.     They  halt  lest  they 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     173 

also  should  become  as  grim  as  these  heavy 
ones  are. 

As  a  tonic,  a  necessary  tonic,  Nietzsche's 
philosophy  is  very  valuable.  As  a  gospel 
it  is,  for  some  of  us,  quite  inadequate.  It 
is  a  mere  weapon,  not  a  whole  armour. 
It  is  not  warm  or  rich  enough  to  subdue 
the  hearts  of  women  and  nerve  the  souls 
of  men,  except  in  their  fleeting  moods.  He 
is  great  as  an  incentive  towards  a  fuller 
wisdom,  of  which  he  has  perhaps  suggested 
one  or  two  keynotes,  and  he  is  a  corrective 
of  much  which  is  flabby  in  our  sentimental, 
humanitarian  morality.  He  has  certainly 
given  us  an  unusual  view  of  suffering,  which 
harmonises  with  the  view  of  it  Hinton 
and  Carpenter  expound.  . 

Nietzsche  protests  against  suffering  as  a' 
punishment  or  as  an  atonement.  He  looks  ^sN- 
upon  it  as  the  most  valuable  and  educative 
event  which  can  come  to  us,  a  true  gift  of 
the  gods,  like  love  or  death.  And  by  pain 
he  means  not  self-sought  suffering,  but  the 


174     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

inevitable  agony  accompanying  the  great 
growths  of  each  individual  life.  To  shun 
suffering,  according  to  Nietzsche,  is  to  shun 
development,  and  so  the  shorter  way  to  the 
over- man.  He  looks  upon  pain  as  a  tool  or 
implement,  also  as  the  father  of  pleasure. 
At  the  end  of  his  satirical  tirade  about 
marriage  and  love,  in  which  the  best  he 
can  say  for  love  is  that  at  its  height  it  is 
only  an  enraptured  similitude  and  a  dolorous 
glow,  he  adds : 

"It  is  a  torch  to  light  you  to  loftier  paths.  You 
are  to  love  beyond  yourselves  some  day.  Then 
learn  first  of  all  to  love  ;  you  had  to  drink  the 
bitter  cup  of  love  on  that  account.  There  is  bitter- 
ness even  in  the  cup  of  the  best  love.  It  thus 
produces  aspiration  towards  the  over-man :  it  thus 
produces  thirst  in  thee,  the  creating  one." 

Happiness,  he  seems  to  argue,  mere  per- 
sonal happiness,  is  not  a  thing  to  be  sought 
for  its  own  sake,  and  suffering  should  be 
more  joyously  received  than  happiness.  "  It 
seems  to  me,"  he  says,    "  who   am   favour- 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     175 


ably  inclined  to  life,  that  butterflies,  soap- 
bubbles,  and  whatever  is  of  a  similar 
kind  among  human  beings,  enjoy  most 
happiness."  In  his  Beyond  Good  and  Evil 
he  says : 

"  You  want,  if  possible — and  there  is  not  a  more 
foolish  '  if  possible1 — to  do  away  with  suffering.  And 
we  ?  It  really  seems  that  we  would  rather  have  it 
increased  and  made  worse  than  it  has  ever  been 
before.  Well-being,  as  you  understand  it,  is  certainly 
not  a  goal ;  it  seems  to  us  an  end,  a  condition,  which 
at  once  renders  man  ludicrous  and  contemptible  and 
makes  his  destruction  desirable.  The  discipline  of 
suffering,  of  great  suffering,  know  ye  not  that  it  is 
only  this  discipline  that  has  produced  all  the  eleva- 
tions of  humanity  hitherto  ?  The  tension  of  soul 
in  misfortune  which  communicates  to  it  its  energy, 
its  shuddering  in  view  of  rack  and  ruin,  its  inventive- 
ness and  bravery  in  steadfastly  enduring,  interpret- 
ing, and  exploiting  misfortune  and  whatever  depth, 
mystery,  disguise,  spirit,  artifice,  or  greatness  has 
been  bestowed  upon  the  soul,  has  it  not  been  bestowed 
through  suffering,  through  the  discipline  of  great 
suffering  ? 

"  In  man,  creature  and  creator  are  united.  In 
man  there  is  not  only   matter,  shred,  excess,  clay, 

12 


176    THREE  MODERN   SEERS 

mire,  folly,  chaos,  but  there  is  also  the  creator,  the 
sculptor,  the  hardness  of  the  hammer,  the  divinity 
of  the  spectator  and  the  seventh  day.  Do  you 
understand  this  contrast  ?  And  that  your  sympathy 
for  '  the  creature  in  man '  applies  to  that  which  has 
to  be  fashioned,  bruised,  forged,  stretched,  roasted, 
annealed,  refined,  to  that  which  must  necessarily 
suffer  and  is  meant  to  suffer  ?  And  our  sympathy  ? 
Do  ye  not  understand  what  our  converse  sympathy 
applies  to,  when  it  resists  your  sympathy  as  the 
worst  of  all  pampering  and  enervation  ?" 

Sympathy  for  others  means  to  him  "  try- 
ing to  smooth  away  every  sharp  edge  and 
corner  in  life,  and  so  turning  mankind  into 
small,  soft,  round,  infinite  sand."  His  work 
abounds  with  such  sentences  as  these : 
"  What  does  not  kill  me  strengthens 
me " ;  and  again,  "  It  is  great  affliction 
only  that  is  the  ultimate  emancipation  of 
the  mind." 

Nietzsche's  attitude  towards  evil  is  as 
original  as  his  attitude  towards  suffering. 
"  All  good  things,"  he  says,  "  were  at  one 
time    bad    things ;    every   original   sin   has 


} 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     177 

developed  into  an  original  virtue."  This  is 
again  a  plea  not  to  miss  the  virtue — to  ven- 
ture on  a  paradox — of  evil.  To  understand 
evil,  even  to  have  had  it  as  a  circumstance 
in  one's  own  life,  is  one  of  the  best  ways  of 
understanding  its  other  and  better  self — 
good. 

"  In  the  twilight  of  the  gods,"  he  says, "  all  passions 
have  a  time  when  they  are  fatal  only,  when,  with 
the  weight  of  their  folly,  they  drag  their  victim 
down  ;  and  they  have  a  later,  a  very  much  later, 
period,  when  they  wed  with  spirit,  when  they  are 
'  spiritualised.'  To  wage  war  against  passion  itself 
is  folly,  as  great  a  folly  as  it  was  for  the  old 
dentist  to  pull  out  teeth  because  they  gave  pain. 
Deadly  hostility  against  sensuality  is  always  a 
critical  symptom  :  one  is  thereby  justified  in  making 
conjectures  with  regard  to  the  general  condition 
of  such  an  extremist.  Moreover,  that  hostility, 
that  hatred,  only  reaches  its  height  when  such 
natures  no  longer  possess  sufficient  strength  for  a 
radical  cure.'" 


Nietzsche  is  always  waging  war  against 
x    the    anti-naturalness    of  current   morality. 


178     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

One  of  his  most  beautiful  and  characteristic 
passages  on  this  is  in  Zarathustra. 

"  Once  thou  hadst  passions  and  calledst  them 
evil.  But  now  thou  hast  only  thy  virtues  ;  they  grew 
out  of  thy  passions.  Thou  enlistedst  those  passions 
on  behalf  of  thy  highest  aim  ;  they  then  became 
thy  virtues  and  joys. 

"And  though  thou  mightest  be  of  the  race  of 
the  hot-tempered,  or  of  the  voluptuous,  or  of  the 
fanatical,  or  of  the  revengeful, 

"  All  thy  passions  in  the  end  became  virtues  and 
all  thy  devils  angels.  Once  thou  hadst  wild  dogs  in 
thy  cellar  ;  but  in  the  end  they  changed  to  birds 
and  charming  songstresses. 

"  Out  of  thy  poisons  thou  hast  brewed  balsam  for 
thyself;  thou  hast  milked  thy  cow,  affliction,  and 
now  thou  drinkest  the  sweet  milk  of  her  udder. 

"  And  henceforth  nothing  evil  grows  in  thee  any 
longer,  unless  it  be  the  evil  that  arises  out  of  the 
conflict  of  thy  virtues.11 

"  If  man  would  no  longer  think  himself 
wicked  he  would  cease  to  be  so,"  he  says  in 
The  Dawn  of  Day. 

To  look  upon  suffering  and  evil  as  forces 
to  help  on  towards  the  over-man,  is  perhaps 


/ 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     179 

the  keynote  of  Nietzsche's  moral  philosophy. 
"  In  nearly  all  crimes,"  he  says,  "  some 
qualities  are  expressed  which  ought  not  to 
be  absent  in  a  man."  To  turn  all  so-called 
evil  and  deep  suffering  into  forces  for  power 
and  development,  to  have  no  waste  of  this 
vigorous  raw  material,  is  to  advance,  accord- 
ing to  Nietzsche.  His  counsel  with  regard  to 
the  treatment  of  our  enemies  is  almost  the 
finest  in  his  work,  and  has  a  distinctly  new 
note  in  it. 

"  When  ye  have  an  enemy,'1  he  says  in  Zarathustra, 
"  do  not  return  him  good  for  evil,  for  that  would 
make  him  ashamed.  But  prove  that  he  has  done 
something  good  to  you.  And  rather,  even,  be  angry 
than  make  a  person  ashamed.  And  when  ye  are 
cursed,  it  is  not  my  pleasure  that  ye  should  desire 
to  bless.     Better  curse  a  little  also." 

His  horror  of  self-righteousness,  or  of  a 
magnanimity  which  savours  of  proving 
one's  own  virtue,  is  very  healthy  and  re- 
freshing. "  We  can  only  raise  men  we  do 
not  treat  with  contempt,"  he  says.  "  Moral 
contempt  is  worse  than  any  crime." 


180     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

Cant  of  any  kind  is,  to  Nietzsche,  the  evil 
of  evils,  and  sincerity  of  vision  the  great 
good.  One  of  his  ideas  in  The  Dawn  of 
Day  might  be  compared  with  Edward 
Carpenter's  philosophy,  and  it  indicates  a 
deeper  wisdom  than  mere  intellectual  in- 
sight. 

"  You  would  like,"  he  says,  "  to  pose  as  discerners 
of  men,  but  you  shall  not  pass  as  such.  Do  you 
fancy  that  we  do  not  notice  that  you  pretend  to 
be  more  experienced,  deeper,  more  passionate,  more 
perfect  than  you  really  are,  as  decidedly  as  we 
notice  in  yon  painter  a  presumptuousness  even  in  the 
way  of  using  his  brush  ;  in  yon  musician,  by  the  way 
he  introduces  his  theme,  a  desire  to  set  it  off'  for 
higher  than  it  really  is  ?  Have  you  ever  experi- 
enced in  yourselves  a  history,  wild  commotions, 
earthquakes,  deep,  long  sadness,  fleeting  happiness  ? 
Have  you  been  foolish  with  great  and  little  fools  ? 
Have  you  really  borne  the  weal  and  woe  of  good 
people,  and  also  the  woe  and  peculiar  happiness 
of  the  most  evil  ?  Then  speak  of  morality,  but  not 
otherwise." 

He  declares  that  the  three  things  most 
hated  and  feared  by  the  virtuous — voluptu- 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     181 

ousness,  thirst  of  power,  and  selfishness — 
have  in  them  the  kernels  of  the  great  virtues. 
Of  voluptuousness  he  says  : 

"  It  is  a  sweet  poison  unto  the  withered  only,  but 
the  great  in  vi  go  ration  of  the  heart,  and  the  rever- 
ently spared  wine  of  wines  for  those  who  have  the 
will  of  a  lion.  Voluptuousness  !  but  I  will  have 
railings  round  my  thoughts,  and  even  round  my 
words,  that  swine  and  enthusiasts  may  not  break  into 
my  gardens ! " 

His  will  to  power,  and  his  antagonism 
to  sympathy,  which  he  considers  weakness, 
make  selfishness,  hardness,  and  love  of  power 
virtues  in  his  eyes.  "  Help  thyself,"  he  says, 
"  then  every  one  else  helps  thee."  His  con- 
ception of  the  four  highest  virtues  is  very 
characteristic  of  the  man.  First  of  all  we 
-are  to  be  perfectly  honest  towards  ourselves, 
and  to  all  who  are  friendly  to  us  ;  valiant 
in  face  of  our  enemy  ;  generous  to  the  van- 
quished ;  and  polite,  always,  and  in  all  cases. 
He  advocates  politeness  as  a  defence  against 
intrusion   and   petty   inquisitions.     "  I    am 


182     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

polite  unto  them  as  I  am  to  all  small 
annoyances.  To  be  bristly  towards  what 
is  small,  seemeth  unto  me  to  be  a  wisdom 
for  hedgehogs."  Force  and  lightness  are 
the  two  things  he  admires.  He  says  in  the 
Wagner  book  that  the  first  proposition  of 
his  {esthetics  is  that  "  everything  divine 
runs  with  light  feet,"  and  all  through  his 
work  we  find  the  dancer  spoken  of  sym- 
bolically in  the  most  enthusiastic  language. 

Nietzsche  has  little  to  say  of  women.  He 
is  curiously  reticent  about  them.  In  his 
philosophy  there  is  evidently  to  be  no 
over-woman.  He  says  that  it  is  only  to  men 
one  should  speak  of  women,  and  all  through 
his  work  one  finds  the  under-man,  and  not 
the  over-man,  judging  women.  "  Every- 
thing in  woman  is  a  riddle,"  he  says,  "  and 
».  everything  in  woman  has  one  solution — 
pregnancy."  Bernard  Shaw  has  perhaps 
helped  us  to  understand  Nietzsche's  gospel 
on  women  in  his  Man  and  Superman.  "  Man 
is  for  woman  a  means  :  the  purpose  is  always 


NIETZSCHE   AND    MORALS     183 

the  child.  But  what  is  woman  for  man  ? " 
Nietzsche  asks  this  question,  and  leaves  it 
wisely  unanswered. 

"  The  true  man,"  says  Nietzsche,  "  wants 
two  different  things — danger  and  diversion. 
He  therefore  wants  a  woman  as  the  most 
dangerous  plaything."  The  best  women  are 
a  little  weary  of  this  point  of  view.  To  be  a 
toy  or  a  danger,  or  both,  is  growing  mono- 
tonous. Were  woman  not  a  consummate 
actress,  and  very  kind-hearted,  she  would 
have  dropped  the  role  long  ago.  "  In  the 
true  man,"  he  says,  "  there  is  a  child  hidden  : 
it  wants  to  play.  Up,  then,  ye  women,  dis- 
cover, I  pray  you,  the  child  in  man."  This 
is  her  mission,  then,  according  to  Nietzsche. 
It  is  an  old-world  one,  and  one  far  from  con- 
temptible— to  bear  children  and  to  amuse. 
One  is  surprised  to  find,  however,  that 
Nietzsche  expects  from  women — who  are 
still  cats  and  birds,  he  thinks,  and  the  best 
of  us  cows — the  greatest  thing  of  all.  "  Let 
your  hope  be,  '  May  I  bear  the  over-man,'  " 


184     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

he  says.  In  his  Wagner  book  he  puts 
women  in  a  strange  category.  "In  the 
theatre,"  he  declares,  "  one  becomes  mob, 
herd,  woman,  Pharisee,  voting  animal,  patron, 
idiot,  Wagnerian.''  "  As  yet,"  he  says,  in 
Zaratkustra,  "  women  are  incapable  of 
friendship."  His  definition  of  friendship 
being  as  high  as  that  of  Thoreau,  it  is 
possible  that  when  a  woman  attains  it  she 
may  be  worthy  to  bear  the  over-man. 
"  Art  thou  pure  air  and  solitude  and  medicine 
to  thy  friend  ?  "  asks  Thoreau. 

"  In  a  woman's  love,"  Nietzsche  says,  "  there  is 
unfairness  and  blindness  to  all  she  does  not  love. 
And  even  in  woman's  enlightened  love  there  are  still 
outbreaks  and  lightnings,  and  night  along  with  the 
light.11  In  his  Wagner  essay  he  declares,  "  Woman 
would  like  to  believe  that  love  can  do  all.  It  is 
a  superstition  peculiar  to  herself.  Alas !  he  who 
knows  the  heart  finds  out  how  poor,  helpless,  pre- 
tentious, and  liable  to  error  even  the  best,  the  deepest 
love  is  ;  how  it  rather  destroys  than  saves.11  In  the 
same  essay  he  says,  "  Man  is  cowardly  before  all  that 
is  eternally  feminine  ;  women  know  it.  In  many 
cases  of  feminine  love  (perhaps  precisely  in  the  most 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     185 

celebrated  cases),  love  is  only  a  more  refined  para- 
sitism, a  nesting  in  a  strange  soul,  sometimes  even 
in  a  strange  body.  Ah !  at  what  expense  always 
to  'the  host1!"  One  wonders  if  the  old  woman  in 
Zarathustra  gave  the  subtlest  advice  a  woman  can 
give  a  man  about  her  sex.  "  Thou  goest  to  women  ?  " 
she  asks.     "  Do  not  forget  the  whip  !  " 

"  Women  always  intrigue  in  secret  against  the 
higher  souls  of  their  husbands ;  they  seek  to  cheat 
them  out  of  the  future  for  the  sake  of  a  painless  and 
comfortable  present."  "  We  think  woman  deep. 
Why?  Because  we  never  find  any  depth  in  her. 
Woman  is  not  even  shallow." 

These  reflections  on  woman  are  worth 
quoting,  because,  as  I  have  said  before, 
Nietzsche  is  a  tonic,  and  wise  women  read 
him  with  an  open  mind,  though,  possibly, 
with  the  suspicion  of  a  smile. 

We  must  always  approach  Nietzsche  with 
no  fear  of  our  own  belief,  or  semi-belief, 
but  with  this  open  mind.  We  must  re- 
member his  own  words  : 

"  The  longing  for  a  strong  belief  is  not  evidence  of 
a  strong  belief;  rather  the  contrary.  When  one  has 
this  belief  one  may  allow  one's  self  the  choice  luxury 


186     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

of  scepticism  ;  one    is    sufficiently  sure,    sufficiently 
resolute,  and  sufficiently  bound  for  doing  so." 

Nietzsche  declares  that  we  refute  a  thing 
best  by  laying  it  respectfully  on  ice.  But 
his  attitude  towards  Christianity  is  the 
attitude  of  a  man  with  a  red-hot  poker  in 
his  hand.  He  dares  to  ask  the  question, 
"  Is  man  only  a  mistake  of  God,  or  God 
only  a  mistake  of  man  ? "  He  demands  of 
philosophers  that  they  take  up  their  position 
beyond  good  and  evil,  and  he  asks  them  to 
become  superior  to  the  illusion  of  moral 
sentiment,  which  belongs,  in  his  mind,  as 
religious  sentiment  does,  to  a  stage  of 
ignorance.  Few  of  us,  as  he  says,  have 
the  courage  for  what  we  really  know,  and 
Nietzsche  is  unspeakably  valuable  to  any 
reader  of  his  who  learns  through  him  to 
re-value  all  he  values  most.  We  need  have 
no  fear.  Wisdom  and  truth  are  not  soap- 
bubbles  ;  they  do  not  burst  by  being  ex- 
amined. To  re-value  is  always  a  painful 
process,  and  means  loss  as  well  as  gain.    The 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     187 

advantage  of  doing  it  is  that  what  is  left  is 
one's  very  own,  bought  often  at  a  great 
price,  but  a  treasure  which  no  man  can  take 
away.  Nietzsche's  attitude  to  religion  and 
morals  is  in  this  way  a  very  necessary 
and  helpful  one.  "  If  there  were  no 
graves,"  he  says,  "  there  would  be  no 
resurrections." 

Perhaps  Nietzsche's  attitude  to  life  and 
morals  is  well  summed  up  in  one  of  the 
finest  passages  in  Zarathustra : 

"  He  who  is  emancipated  in  spirit  has  still  to 
purify  himself.  Many  traces  of  the  prison  and  the 
mould  still  remain  in  him ;  his  eye  has  yet  to  be- 
come pure.  Yea,  I  know  thy  danger.  But  by  my 
love  and  hope  I  conjure  thee:  cast  not  away  thy 
love  and  thy  hope ! 

"  Thou  still  feelest  thyself  noble,  and  the  others 
also  still  feel  thee  noble  who  bear  thee  a  grudge  and 
cast  evil  looks.  Know  this,  that  to  every  one  a 
noble  one  stands  in  the  way. 

"  A  noble  one  stands  also  in  the  way  of  the  good ; 
and,  even  when  they  call  him  good,  they  want  there- 
by to  thrust  him  aside. 

"The  noble  one  wants  to  create  something  new, 


188     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

he  wants  to  make  a  new  virtue.  The  good  man 
wants  what  is  old,  he  wants  the  old  to  be  retained. 
But  the  danger  of  the  noble  one  is  not  lest  he  be- 
come a  good  man,  but  lest  he  become  a  bully,  a 
scoffer,  a  destroyer. 

"  Ah  !  I  have  known  noble  ones  who  lost  their 
highest  hope.  And  then  they  disparaged  all  high 
hopes.  They  then  lived  unabashed,  gratifying  tem- 
porary pleasures,  and  seldom  laid  out  plans  for  more 
than  a  day. 

"  '  Spirit  is  voluptuousness  ! ,  they  said.  Then  the 
wings  of  their  spirit  broke,  and  now  it  creeps  about, 
befouling  where  it  gnaws. 

"  Once  they  thought  of  becoming  heroes ;  now 
they  are  sensualists.  The  hero  is  a  trouble  and  a 
terror  to  them. 

"  But  by  my  love  and  hope  I  conjure  thee :  cast 
not  away  the  hero  in  thy  soul !  Maintain  holy  thy 
highest  hope ! 

"  I  do  not  exhort  you  to  work,  but  to  fight.  I  do 
not  exhort  you  to  peace,  but  to  victory.  Let  your 
work  be  a  battle,  let  your  peace  be  a  victory.11 

SELECTED  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Fhiedrich  Nietzsche.  The  Complete  Works,  in  eighteen 
volumes  (now  in  course  of  publi- 
cation under  the  editorship  of 
Dr.  Oscar  Levy). 


NIETZSCHE   AND   MORALS     189 


M.  A.  Mugge.  Nietzsche :     His    Life    and    Work 

1908.       Contains    a    full    Biblio- 
graphy. 

Havki.ock  Ellis.  "  Frederick  Nietzsche,"  Affirmations. 

1898. 

A.   R.   Orage.  Nietzsche:    The    Dionysian    Spirit   of 

the  Aye.     1906. 

Thomas  Cojhaion.  Nietzsche  as  Critic,  Philosopher,  Poet, 

and  Prophet.     Selections  from  his 
Works.     1901. 


CHAPTER   VI 

EDWARD  CARPENTER'S  MESSAGE  TO  HIS  AGE 


13 


CHAPTER  VI 

EDWARD   CARPENTER'S   MESSAGE   TO   HIS   AGE 

Carpenter's  personal  serenity — Reason  for  this— His 
attitude  to  the  problems  of  the  moment— His 
conception  of  true  democracy — His  attitude  to 
love,  death,  and  failure— Real  life  from  within— 
Faith  and  its  result. 

Edward  Carpenter,  to  use  his  own  words, 
is  one  of  those — 

"  who  dream  the  impossible  dream,  and  it  comes 
true ;  who  hear  the  silent  prayers ;  who  accept  the 
trampling  millions,  as  the  earth,  dreaming,  accepts 
the  interminable  feet  of  her  children ;  who  dream 
the  dream  which  all  men  always  declare  futile ;  who 
dream  the  hour  which  is  not  yet  on  earth,  and,  lo  ! 
it  strikes.11 

In  these  days  of  storm  and  stress,  not 
only  in  politics,  but  in  morals  and  personal 
faith,  it  is  refreshing  to  study  the  works  of 
a  man  who  is  at  peace  with  himself.    Neither 

198 


194     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

Hinton  nor  Nietzsche  had  reached  personal 
serenity.  There  is  nothing  so  certain  to 
confound  the  tangible  as  the  intangible. 
The  true  idealist  is  the  mover  of  men  and 
communities.  When  God  whispers  him  in 
the  ear,  as  Browning  puts  it,  there  and  then 
the  newer  thought,  the  wider  plan  in  the 
progress  of  human  affairs,  is  a  certainty. 
When  a  man  joins  on  to  the  expression  of 
his  vision  the  simple  expression  of  himself, 
and  walks  in  and  out  among  his  fellows, 
content  to  ignore  mere  culture  and  intel- 
lectualism,  but  not  content  to  ignore  a 
single  phase  of  suffering,  we  have  a  subtle, 
far-reaching  influence  which  confounds  the 
worldly  wise,  and  helps  the  strugglers  of 
this  world  towards  a  newer  vision. 

Edward  Carpenter  is  such  a  driving  force. 
Probably  no  man  of  the  age  has  just  the 
same  all-round  message  for  the  vital  needs 
of  the  age  as  this  man.  His  philosophy 
has  a  subtle  suggestiveness  for  every-day 
use  in  politics,  economics,  morals,  domes- 


CARPENTER'S   MESSAGE     195 

ticity,  and  all  the  complexities  of  modern 
civilisation.  His  practical  aims  and  sugges- 
tions are  worth  what  they  are  because,  to 
Carpenter,  first  and  foremost,  the  things  of 
the  spirit  are  essential.  It  is  the  mystic  in 
him  which  drives  him  to  the  socialist's 
working  ground,  where  the  aim  among  the 
true  modern  workers  is  to  give  to  every 
man  and  every  woman  on  earth  an  equal 
opportunity  with  every  other  man  and 
every  other  woman.  Their  perfectly  just 
cry  for  equality,  and  the  plea  of  the  masses 
to  gain  the  rights  which  the  classes  monopo- 
lise, in  many  mouths  merely  means  that 
there  should  be  a  turning  of  tables  ;  that  the 
labourer  should  step  into  the  dull  shoes  of 
the  tyrant,  whose  god  may  possibly  not  be 
his  belly,  but  often  seems  to  be  his  banking 
account.  A  transference  from  the  classes 
to  the  masses  of  materialistic  well-being  is 
no  solution  of  the  social  evil. 

It  is  the  seer  in  Carpenter  which  makes 
him  take  the  part  of  his  fur-coated  and  four- 


196     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

footed  brothers  against  the  vivisectionist 
and  the  slaughter-house  torturer.  To  him 
nothing  is  low  or  mean,  and  our  brothers 
the  animals  come  in  for  his  love  and  mercy 
as  much  as  the  outcast,  and  even  the  self- 
righteous. 

He  is  not  merely  a  vegetarian,  a  socialist, 
an  anarchist.  Fads  are,  indeed,  his  abhor- 
rence. He  is  a  seer  in  the  only  real  sense  of 
that  word,  for  he  is  one  who  sees  and  loves 
beyond  himself.  His  message  is  the  message 
of  one  who  sees  clearly,  who  thinks  sanely, 
and  who  lives  uncompromisingly.  "Ask  no 
questions,"  he  says  ;  "all  that  you  have,  for 
love's  sake,  spend."  It  is  the  visionary 
which  makes  him  do  any  bit  of  practical 
scavenging,  so  to  speak,  to  clear  the  world 
of  lust  and  hypocrisy,  disguised  under  the 
names  of  love  and  expediency. 

Carpenter  is  not  the  practical  man  with 
a  glimpse  of  his  vision.  He  is  the  man  of 
vision,  who  as  a  consequence,  an  imperative 
outcome  of  his  vision,  demands  a  practical 


CARPENTERS   MESSAGE     197 

output  for  his  ideals.  The  prophet  in  him 
lays  a  stress  upon  simplification  of  life,  not 
because  he  believes  it  to  be  an  end  in  itself, 
but  because  it  is  a  means  to  an  end. 

.  Few  of  us,  even  the  poorest,  have  actually 
put  in  practice  the  true  conditions  of  the 
simplicity  of  life,  for  nothing  is  so  elaborate 
and  involved  and  wasteful  as  the  way  the 
poor  live.  They  have  no  knowledge  of  the 
simplest  digestible  cooking,  and  the  domestic 
method  and  cleanliness  in  their  homes,  if  it 
exists,  is  obtained  at  an  expenditure  of 
energy  and  nerve-strain  which  is  pitiable. 
Many  tiny  homes  could  be  rendered  beau- 
tiful to-day,  and  many  faces  made  bright 
and  cheery,  in  spite  of  bad  wages,  if  the 
owners  of  the  homes  understood  true  sim- 
plicity of  living. 

In  all  his  work,  as  in  his  life,  Carpenter 
makes  no  compromise  with  the  practical 
difficulties  of  the  moment.  Here  and  now, 
he  declares,  the  rich  and  the  poor  alike  can 
begin  to  live  beautifully  and  simply.     Life 


198     THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

can  be  reduced  to  terms  of  sense  and  beauty 
as  apart  from  extravagance  and  show.  His 
followers  mistake  him  when  they  consider 
that  his  ideal  of  simplification — his  sandal- 
wearing  and  his  vegetarianism — are  the  main 
outcome  of  the  great  message  he  has  for  his 
age.  They  are  mere  details  of  his  social 
solution  towards  the  equality  of  opportunity 
involved  in  any  rational  socialistic  or  even 
Christian  teaching,  for  socialism  is  a  mere 
detail  in  a  much  wider  scheme  of  reform. 

Carpenter's  emphasis,  again,  on  a  mini- 
mum of  clothing  is  not  a  plea  for  a  return 
to  savagery,  but  the  demand  of  Nature's 
child  that  there  should  be  as  few  wrappings 
as  possible  between  the  temple  of  the  body 
and  the  Holy  Ghost  encompassing  it.  He 
insists  on  a  vote  for  women,  not  because 
the  vote  in  itself  is  an  essential  to  the  true 
life  of  either  a  man  or  a  woman,  but  because 
justice  is,  and  what  is  just  for  the  man  in 
this  question  is  just  for  the  woman.  He 
would  induce  men  to  become  vegetarians, 


CARPENTER'S   MESSAGE     199 

not  because  the  eating  of  flesh  is  an  accursed 
thing,  but  because  cruelty  and  hardness  of 
heart,  which  as  yet  are  bound  up  with  the 
killing  of  animals,  are  accursed  things.  He 
would  strive  to  alter  the  prison  system,  not 
because  he  fails  to  perceive  that  suffering 
and  discipline  are  necessary  for  reform,  but 
because  he  realises  that  the  mental  attitude 
of  the  judge  towards  the  offender  is  often 
to-day  as  anti-social  and  anti-Christian  as 
the  attitude  of  the  offender  towards  society. 
Carpenter's  value  as  a  reformer  is,  that  his 
message  or  philosophy  can  be  applied  equally 
to  the  right  making  of  a  pudding  or  the  fine 
framing  of  new  national  laws,  and  yet  the 
very  pith  of  his  message  has  to  do  with  the 
things  which  are  not  temporal,  but  eternal. 
People  who  consider  themselves  practical 
and  hard-headed  say,  "  Yes,  idealism  is  all 
very  well,  but  I  want  something  tangible." 
Let  them  realise,  then,  that  they  can  have 
it  in  Carpenter's  message.  A  thought  pro- 
duced  the   steam-engine  ;    and   the   Christ 


200     THREE    MODERN    SEERS 

whom  we  slay  every  hour  and  worship  every 
Sunday  only  gave  us  thoughts  to  mould  into 
action. 

Twenty  years  ago  it  was  quite  a  usual 
thing  to  hear  Edward  Carpenter  spoken  of 
as  a  madman,  an  impossible  eccentric,  and 
a  teacher  of  dangerous  doctrines.  The 
forerunner,  then,  was  disowned  by  the 
crowd.  It  is  usual  enough  now  to  hear  this 
same  man  spoken  of  as  a  divine  messenger, 
a  prophet,  a  seer. 

The  transition  from  condemnation  to 
recognition  in  the  case  of  this  particular 
teacher  has  been  curiously  swift.1  Why  is 
this  ?  Simply  because  the  man  himself  and 
his  message  are  really  expressions  of  what  is 
actually  round  about  us.  Edward  Carpenter, 
even  as  a  personality,  is  not  so  rare  a 
manifestation  of  individual  harmony  as  he 
was  twenty  years  ago,  for  the  simple  reason 

1  It  is  interesting'  to  note  that,  like  so  many  prophets, 
Carpenter's  recognition  has  come  first  from  abroad.  In 
Germany  his  books  have  long  been  known,  and  have  passed 
through  many  editions  in  translation. 


CARPENTER'S   MESSAGE     201 

that  sincerity,  singleness,  and  simplicity  are 
contagious,  and  are  even  becoming  fashion- 
able. Edward  Carpenter  is  now  only  one 
of  many  teachers  of  democratic  mysti- 
cism, though  on  some  matters  he  still 
remains  curiously  alone.  Perhaps  his  own 
words  in  the  beginning  of  Towards  De- 
mocracy express  this  : 

"  I  am  the  poet  of  hitherto  unuttered  joy. 

A  little  bird  told  me  the  secret  in  the  night, 
and  henceforth  I  go  about  seeking  to  whom  to 
whisper  it. 

I  see  the  heavens  laughing,  I  discern  the  half- 
hidden  faces  of  the  gods  wherever  I  go,  I  see  the 
transparent-opaque  veil  in  which  they  hide  them- 
selves, yet  I  dare  not  say  what  I  see,  lest  I  should 
be  locked  up ! 

Children  go  with  me,  and  rude  people  are  my 
companions.  I  trust  them,  and  they  me.  Day  and 
night  we  are  together  and  are  content. 

To  them  what  I  would  say  is  near ;  yet  is  it 
in  nothing  that  can  be  named,  or  in  the  giving  or 
taking  of  any  one  thing  ;  but  rather  in  all  things." 

Carpenter  has  found  out  what  he  believes 
in  and  he  is  living  it,  and  is  perfectly  and 


202     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

serenely  happy,  as  a  man  or  woman  only 
can  be  happy  when  the  inner  and  outer 
life  harmonise.  He  has  deliberately  cast 
aside  all  pretences  of  living  in  order  to  live 
in  reality.  This  perhaps  is  what  makes  his 
great  practical  value  for  us,  as  out  of  this 
has  grown  the  inner  light  in  the  man  which 
is  so  strangely  beautiful.  He  is  a  man  of 
wisdom  more  than  of  mere  knowledge — the 
wisdom  which  is  childlike,  saintlike,  and  in 
him  distinctly  pagan  too. 

Carpenter's  development  was  a  gradual 
one,  from  the  Broad  Church  point  of  view 
to  the  sanest  conclusions  of  a  spiritual 
democrat.  He  was  once  a  curate  under 
Frederick  Maurice.  He  slowly  but  surely 
began  to  realise  that  he  could  not  go  on 
preaching  under  limited  conditions,  so  he 
left  the  Church. 

He  was  a  Cambridge  lecturer,  and  during 
his  Extension  work  in  different  towns  he 
began  to  look  into  the  lives  of  the  poor,  the 
criminal,  the  chanceless,  and  the  despised. 


CARPENTER'S   MESSAGE     203 

This  brought  him  nearer  to  socialism,  and 
so  he  abandoned  talking  and  began  to 
think.  He  was  not  actually  poor,  and  so 
had  leisure  to  come  to  conclusions,  but  he 
soon  left  the  "  undesirable  mansions,"  with 
their  conventions,  and  came  to  his  own. 
His  discovery  of  Walt  Whitman  was  the 
means  to  this  end ;  and  it  is  extremely 
interesting  to  the  student  of  both  men  to 
note  their  apparent  likeness  and  their  funda- 
mental differences. 

Carpenter  found  himself  through  Walt 
Whitman  ;  but  the  temperaments  of  the  two 
men,  and,  in  consequence,  their  messages 
are  both  individual  and  valuable  in  different 
ways.  Carpenter  began  to  realise  that  no 
cleric,  no  middle-class  idler,  no  conventional 
philanthropist,  no  mere  self-seeker  or  maxim- 
maker,  and  no  insincere  person  can  radically 
alter  institutions  till  they  have  altered  them- 
selves. It  is  always  a  painful  process  to 
re-adjust  life  on  a  new  basis.  Carpenter 
has  never  regretted  doing  this,  though  to  the 


204     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

casual  observer  he  seemed  to  have  nothing 
left.  He  abandoned  office,  position,  social 
fussiness  and  entanglements,  and  lived  a 
simple  life  in  a  cottage.  He  had  found 
peace  and  had  delivered  himself  from  all 
shams  of  every  sort  and  kind. 

To  the  believer  in  luxuries,  to  the  dweller 
in  cities,  to  the  bewildered  but  strenuous 
philanthropist,  it  could  not  seem  anything 
but  the  act  of  a  madman  that  Carpenter 
should  live  the  life  of  a  simple  workman 
and  refuse  to  compete  with  or  enslave  his 
fellow  men  or  to  eat  animals.  That  he 
could  reduce  life  to  simplicity  without  mak- 
ing himself  inefficient  or  miserable  seemed 
to  many  impossible.  To  dream  dreams  and 
to  see  new  spiritual  visions  as  a  sequel  to 
hard  work  seemed  too  absurd  a  solution  of 
a  social  problem.  Happily  the  marriage 
of  ideas  between  the  East  and  the  West 
has  begun  to  teach  us  that  a  man's  real 
life  does  not,  cannot,  exist  in  externals,  nor 
does  it  wholly  consist  in  strenuous  action, 


CARPENTER'S   MESSAGE     205 

but  in  the  possession  of  one's  own  soul  and 
its  peace. 

"  Do  not  be  discouraged  by  the  tiny  in- 
solences of  people,"  says  Carpenter ;  "  for 
yourself,  be  only  careful  that  you  are  true." 
To  this  man  it  appears  that  it  is  not  so  much 
what  happens  that  matters,  for  life  is  a  very 
tiny  stage  in  a  very  long  journey,  according 
to  him.  The  happy  man  is  not  the  one  who 
has  possessions,  but  who  has  himself  in 
possession.  This  socialist  seems  to  say  that 
it  is  not  what  we  gain,  but  what  we  are 
that  matters.  His  democracy  does  not 
demand  only  that  a  man  shall  return  to 
the  community  an  equivalent  of  what  he 
takes  from  it,  but  it  demands  also  that  he 
should  "  walk  in  and  out  among  his  fellows 
accepted,"  returning  to  them  some  of  his 
own  inner  vision. 

Edward  Carpenter  is  a  prophet  of  the 
soul  and  of  the  body.  He  proclaims  the 
emancipation  of  the  soul  through  the  com- 
pletion of  its  relation  to  the  body.     In  his 


206     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

gospel  paganism  and  Christianity  are  not 
at  war,  but  are  allies.  All  our  faculties,  all 
our  instincts,  and  even  all  our  weaknesses, 
are  so  much  raw  material  to  aid  the  life 
of  the  soul.  To  over-emphasise  the  body  is 
to  hide  the  soul. 

"  The  body,"  he  declares,  "  is  a  root  of 
the  soul."  To  despise  the  body,  as  the 
ascetic,  is  as  stupid  as  to  despise  the  soul. 
To  despise  the  soul  is  to  miss  the  subtleties 
and  sweetnesses  of  all  the  wonderful  func- 
tions of  the  body. 

"  The  soul  invading,"  makes  the  body 
its  temple,  according  to  Carpenter,  and  its 
desires  thus  become  educative  and  righteous 
when  they  are  understood.  Perhaps  one  of 
the  most  beautiful  things  Edward  Carpenter 
has  interpreted  for  us  is  the  way  the  real 
self  enters  into  relationship  with  the  body. 
In  The  Art  of  Creation  he  says — 

"  that  the  individual  should  conceive  and  know 
himself,  not  as  a  toy  and  chance  product  of  his  own 
bodily  heredity,  but  as   identified   and   continuous 


CARPENTER'S   MESSAGE     207 

with  the  Eternal  Self,  of  which  his  body  is  a 
manifestation :  this  is  indeed  to  begin  a  new 
life  and  to  enter  a  hitherto  undreamed  world  of 
possibilities." 

"Beware,"  he  says  elsewhere,  "lest  it  (the  body) 
become  thy  grave  and  thy  prison  instead  of  thy 
winged  abode  and  palace  of  joy. 

For  (over  and  over  again)  there  is  nothing  that  is 
evil  except  because  a  man  has  not  mastery  over  it ; 
and  there  is  no  good  thing  that  is  not  evil,  if  it  have 
mastery  over  a  man  ; 

And  there  is  no  passion  or  power,  or  pleasure  or 
pain,  or  created  thing  whatsoever,  which  is  not  ulti- 
mately for  man  and  for  his  use — or  which  he  need  be 
afraid  of,  or  ashamed  at. 

The  ascetics  and  the  self-indulgent  divide  things 
into  good  and  evil—  as  it  were  to  throw  away  the 
evil ; 

But  things  cannot  be  divided  into  good  and  evil, 
but  all  are  good  so  soon  as  they  are  brought  into 
subjection." 

This  idea,  that  "the  soul's  slow  dis- 
entanglement "  is  dependent  on  the  way 
we  use,  not  crush,  the  powers  of  the  body 
now,  is  startling  in  its  truth.  His  very 
insistence   on   the   body's   claim   makes   us 

14 


208     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

feel   as  we  read   him  that   he   knows   the 
soul  is  ultimately  all. 

"  In  the  antechambers  of  the  body,  beautiful 
as  they  are,  you  shall  look  in  vain  for  the  Master. 
In  the  antechamber  of  the  intellect,  important  as 
it  is,  it  is  vain  to  tarry.  In  the  antechambers 
of  art  and  morality  you  shall  not  tarry  overlong. 
All  conventions  left  aside,  all  limitations  passed, 
all  shackles  dropped,  the  husks  and  sheaths  of 
ages  falling  off,  at  length  the  wanderer  returns  to 
Heaven ." 

And  again  : 

"  When  the  ideal  has  once  alighted,  when  it  has 
looked  forth  from  the  windows,  with  ever  so  passing 
a  glance  upon  the  earth,  then  we  may  go  in  to  supper, 
you  and  I,  and  take  our  ease ;  the  rest  will  be 
seen  to." 

This  optimist,  and  materialist  too  if  you 
like,  but  above  all  mystic  and  spiritualist, 
tells  us  calmly  that  there  must  be  no  less 
scrubbing  of  doorsteps  for  us  (if  that  happens 
to  be  our  work)  because  of  this  new  vision  of 
welded  souls  and  bodies  making  for  immor- 


CARPENTER'S   MESSAGE     209 

tality.  The  stimulating  fact  in  Carpenter's 
philosophy  is,  that  out  of  the  humanising 
of  any  instinct  from  the  animalism  primarily 
involved  in  it,  comes  the  true  spiritualisation 
of  it.  First  the  root,  the  human  ;  then  the 
flower,  the  spiritual. 

"  The  main  thing  is,"  he  says,  "  that  the  messenger 
is  perhaps  even  now  at  your  door,  and  to  see  that 
you  are  ready  for  his  arrival. 

A  little  child,  a  breath  of  air,  an  old  man  hob- 
bling on  crutches,  a  bee  lighting  on  the  page  of  your 
book,  who  knows  whom  he  may  send  ? 

Some  one  diseased  or  dying,  some  friendless,  out- 
cast, criminal — one  whom  it  shall  ruin  your  reputa- 
tion to  be  seen  with — yet  see  that  you  are  ready  for 
his  arrival." 

"  The  stones,"  he  says,  for  his  temple  "  are 
anywhere  and  everywhere  ;  the  temple-roof  is  the 
sky. 

The  materials  are  the  kettle  boiling  on  the  fire, 
the  bread  in  the  oven,  the  washing-dolly,  the  axe, 
the  gavelock — the  product  is  God. 

And  the  little  kitchen  where  you  live,  the  shelves, 
the  pewter,  the  nightly  lamp,  the  fingers  and  faces  of 
your  children — a  finished  and  beautiful  Transparency 
of  your  own  Body." 


210     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

There  is  no  shirking  of  everyday 
duties,  no  lethargy  or  swoon  of  the 
spirit,  no  indecent  haste  to  save  one's  own 
soul  and  let  the  bodies  of  men  suffer  for 
need  of  our  helping  hands.  "  If  I  am  not 
level  with  the  lowest,  I  am  nothing," 
says  this  man.  Only  "  from  yourself  to 
yourself  I  can  deliver  you,  and  from  the 
bonds  of  action  " — never  from  action  itself, 
only  from  hurry,  self-importance,  husks 
and  empty  masks  of  worldly  wisdom,  fear, 
self-interest,  and  cruelty.  From  these  he 
would  have  us  absolutely  disentangle  our- 
selves. 

In  his  work,  as  in  his  life,  Carpenter 
makes  no  compromise  with  the  practical 
difficulties  of  the  moment.  Here  and  now, 
he  says,  each  individual  can  begin  to  realise 
and  to  do  the  highest  he  knows.  Demo- 
cratic in  the  real  sense,  he  tells  us  plainly 
how  the  true  democracy  can  be  evolved, 
though  Carpenter  does  not  place  enough 
insistence  on  beauty  as  not  only  not  harm- 


CARPENTERS   MESSAGE     211 

ful,  but  absolutely  essential  to  any  condition 
of  true  living.1 

So  many  people  think,  if  they  have  an 
ill-fitting  dress,  eat  a  badly  cooked  dinner, 
and  have  no  ravishment  in  the  clean,  sweet 
uses  of  the  senses,  they  are  leading  a  moral 
life.  It  is  a  profound  depth  of  immorality 
to  be  able  to  live  without  beauty,  and  per- 
haps the  most  tragic  thing  in  our  social 
system  is,  that,  while  one  class  has  a  surfeit 
of  luxury  and  show,  which  they  mistake 
for  beauty,  another  class  is  deprived  of 
beauty  altogether.  It  is  more  beauty  we 
want  and  less  luxury.  The  moment  capi- 
talists or  millionaires  become  imbued  with 
Carpenter's  spirit,  they  will  be  content  to 
die  possessed  of  one  pound  and  fourpence- 
halfpenny,  as  Cardinal  Manning  died,  be- 
cause they  would  have  distributed  all  they 
had  to  those  who  were  handicapped  in  the 

1  Eveu  in  Angela'  Wings,  a  volume  of  essays  dealing  mainly 
with  art,  he  is  chiefly  concerned  with  moral  and  social 
questions, 


212     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

race  of  life.  This  is  not  an  insane  idea.  It 
is  only  the  Christianity  we  preach  and  forget 
to  live. 

But,  though  the  man  imbued  with  Car- 
penter's message  would  only  care  to  die 
poor,  he  should  see  to  it  during  his  life  that 
every  useful  thing  about  him  was  beautiful, 
because  then  it  would  not  only  give  adequate 
payment  to  the  makers,  but  give  them  sheer 
joy  in  their  work.  The  very  curse  of 
modern  civilisation  is  the  rush  and  hurry  to 
make  shoddy  things,  which  do  not  spiritually 
benefit  the  one  who  makes  them  or  the  one 
who  uses  them. 

Most  of  us  who  believe  in  the  other  side  of 
things  at  all,  believe  that  there,  at  any  rate, 
will  be  an  increase  in  beauty.  The  best  pre- 
paration for  that  is  to  get  as  much  loveliness 
as  we  can  out  of  the  raw  material  we  have 
on  earth,  and  to  see  to  it,  above  all,  that  every 
other  man  and  woman  gets  it  too.  The  lack 
of  beauty  is  as  demoralising  as  the  lack  of  food. 

To  feed  souls  and  bodies  should  be  the 


CARPENTER'S   MESSAGE     213 

aim  of  any  nation  calling  itself,  not  only 
righteous,  but  sane  and  practical.  Some 
form  of  labour  ought  to  become  the  daily 
portion  of  all  of  us,  so  that  we  allow  men 
and  women,  as  far  as  possible,  to  be  ends 
in  themselves,  and  not  mere  means  to  the 
private  ends  of  another.  Edward  Carpenter, 
the  practical  seer,  declares  that  it  is  mainly 
in  doing  these  necessary  things  that  the 
spiritual  insight  comes. 

To  rid  life  of  snobbery  and  class  prejudice 
tends  towards  the  understanding  of  the 
criminal  and  the  sufferer,  apart  from  all 
questions  of  philanthropy  and  expediency. 
The  vice  of  separateness  is  to  Carpenter 
the  veritable  sin  against  the  Holy  Ghost. 
Perhaps  it  is  this  attitude  of  democratic 
solidarity,  combined  with  visionary  mysti- 
cism, which  places  him  in  the  forefront  of 
modern  teachers. 

We  may  read  Carpenter's  gospel  and 
honestly  declare  that  it  is  too  hard  for  us, 
but  the  peace  beyond  all  mere  moralities 


214     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

or  intellectualisms  breathes  from  it.  Of 
course  his  religion  is  mainly  of  the  spirit, 
and  to  many,  as  yet,  the  work  of  the  soul 
seems  unreal  and  without  apparent  result 
in  politics,  commerce,  and  the  daily  struggle 
of  life.  For  these,  the  mystic  Carpenter 
has  a  practical  demand.  Leave  soul  alone 
then,  he  seems  to  say,  and  don't  batten 
on  bodies,  either  human  or  brute,  and  the 
rest  will  be  seen  to.  This  man,  who  some- 
times appears  to  be  almost  sentimentally 
lenient  to  the  sinner,  can  thunder  out  in- 
vectives against  the  "  philanthropic  chatter- 
boxes "  and  the  hinderers  of  real  life.  In 
the  beginning  of  his  Towards  Democracy 
his  sledge-hammer  eloquence  leaves  us  no 
doubt  of  his  views  about  social  parasitism. 
Carpenter,  however,  being  the  seer  and  not 
the  mere  social  democrat,  knows  there  is  a 
great  hope,  a  big  reality  of  living,  behind 
these  conventional  contortions. 

"  Apart  from  all  evil,"  he  says,  "  from  all   that 
seems  to  you  evil,  your  soul,  my  friend,  that  towards 


CARPENTER'S   MESSAGE     215 

which  you  aspire,  your  true  Self,  rides  above  your 
phantasmal  self  continually.  If  there  were  chance 
it  were  evil,  but  there  is  not.  The  soul  surrounds 
chance  and  takes  it  captive." 

It  is  this  phantasmal  self,  with  its  masks 
and  antics,  he  would  have  us  understand 
and  gradually  slip  away  from  to  our  real 
self,  and  this  demand  is  at  the  root  of 
Carpenter's  philosophy. 

"  To  be  Yourself,  to  have  measureless  trust,  to 
enjoy  all,  to  possess  nothing.  To  entertain  no 
possible  fear  or  doubt  about  the  upshot  of  things. 
To  be  Yourself,  to  have  measureless  Trust.  Perhaps 
that  is  best  of  all  ?  "  This  knowledge  he  expresses 
in  almost  a  sentence :  "  Deep  as  the  universe  is  my 
life,  and  I  know  it ;  nothing  can  dislodge  the  know- 
ledge of  it ;  nothing  can  destroy,  nothing  can  harm 
me." 

This  is  the  secret  of  all  this  man's  peace ; 
his  belief  in  the  ultimate  upshot  of  things 
and  his  readiness  to  accept  the  small  and  the 
great  demands  which  direction,  not  chance, 
bring  to  his  hand.  From  this  combina- 
tion of  belief  and  action  he  finds  what  are 


216     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

the  real  inner  meanings  of  freedom  and 
joy,  love  and  death,  about  which  we  all 
ponder  and  agonise  when  the  masks  are 
laid  aside  and  our  real  selves  are  face  to 
face  with  our  phantasmal  selves.  He  is 
single,  and  so  his  weaknesses  have  ceased 
to  be  hypocrisies  and  his  virtues  are  not 
grim  and  heavy.  He  is  too  much  of  a 
humorist  to  be  a  mere  ethical  leader.  He 
is  too  much  of  a  woman  to  be  completely 
and  dogmatically  logical ;  and  he  is  so  much 
a  child  that  he  has  neared  the  beginnings 
of  essential  wisdom.  The  man  who  could 
write  Squinancy  Wort  and  the  Baby  Song 
could  never  be  anything  but  a  large,  human- 
hearted  seer  of  the  sweetnesses  and  mysti- 
cisms of  what  is  very  small  and  very  large. 

"  Freedom,"  says  Carpenter,  "  has  to  be 
won  afresh  every  morning" — the  freedom 
of  the  spirit,  wherein  joy  dwells,  and  doubt 
and  fear  are  cast  aside.  The  forming  of 
the  wings  of  man  beneath  the  outer  husk 
is  a  slow  process,  and  almost,  according  to 


CARPENTERS   MESSAGE     217 

his  views,  a  matter  of  habit.  "  Freedom 
must  be  won  afresh  every  morning."  Along- 
side this  command,  all  through  his  work, 
there  is  a  refrain  which  seems  at  one  with 
Nature,  "  Do  not  hurry ;  have  faith."  Always 
in  his  philosophy  we  find  dualities.  Here 
we  have  activity  and  resignation.  We  are 
to  act,  but  not  to  be  caught  in  the  bonds 
of  the  act.  We  are  to  aid  in  getting 
towards  the  upshot  of  things,  but  never 
to  be  concerned  at  apparent  failure,  disaster, 
or  loss.  With  the  calm  assurance  of  one 
who  knows,  he  tells  us  that  sorrow  is  a  gift 
of  gifts,  the  revealer  of  joy,  and  that  death, 
wrongly  called  the  arch-fiend,  is  the  way 
to  freedom  and  joy  and  expansion.  Death, 
to  him,  is  indeed  a  mere  "passing  along." 
"  Death  shall  change  as  the  light  in  the 
morning  changes ;  death  shall  change  as 
the  light  'twixt  moonset  and  dawn."  And 
again : 

"  Oh,  blessed  is  he  that  has  passed  away  ! 
Blessed,  alive  or  dead,  whom  the  bitter  taunts  ot 


218     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

existence  reach  not — nor  betrayals  protruded  from 
dear  faces,  nor  weariness,  nor  cold,  nor  pain — dwell- 
ing in  heaven,  and  looking  forth  in  peace  upon  the 
world. 

Blessed,  thrice  blessed,  by  day,  by  night !  Blessed 
who  sleeps  with  him,, blessed  who  eats,  walks,  talks, 
blessed  who  labours  in  the  field  beside  him  ;  blessed 
whoever,  though  he  be  dead,  shall  know  him  to  be 
eternally  near." 

In  his  poem,  "  To  One  who  is  Where  the 
Eternal  are,"  we  have  the  more  personal  note, 
and  at  the  end  we  get  the  simple  wisdom  of 
one  who  has  lost  and  then  found,  and  for 
whom  the  "  noiseless  wing  "  has  no  more 
terrors.  "  Man  has  to  learn  to  die,  quite 
simply  and  naturally,  as  the  child  has  to 
learn  to  walk,"  he  says. 

It  is  not  only  towards  death  itself  that 
Carpenter  presents  a  new  conception  of 
values,  so  to  speak.  He  has  comfort  for 
those  who  find  a  death  in  life  through  being 
denied  just  those  things  which  seem  to 
be  advantages  and  passports  to  social  help, 
friendly  relationships,  and  lovely  joys. 


CARPENTER'S   MESSAGE     219 

"  What  if  your  prayers  had  been  granted  ?  What 
if  you  had  become  exceptional,  and  had  secured  for 
yourself  a  place  with  the  strong  and  the  gifted  and 
the  beautiful  ?  What  if,  when  you  arrived,  the  eyes 
of  all  had  been  turned  upon  you  :  and  when  you 
passed  by — one  by  one — sad,  thoughtful,  depressed, 
the  weak  more  conscious  of  his  or  her  weakness,  the 
stupid  more  conscious  of  stupidity,  the  deformed 
more  painfully  conscious  of  his  or  her  deformity,  to 
their  solitary  chambers,  they  had  gone  apart  and 
prayed  they  had  never  been  born  ? 

What  if  you  had  taken  advantage  of  the  weak 
and  defenceless  and  oppressed  of  the  whole  earth,  and 
had  bartered  away  belief  in  the  soul  standing  omni- 
potent in  the  most  despised  things  ?  What  if  you 
had  gladly  disguised  and  covered  your  own  defect, 
allowing  thus  the  ignorant  ridicule  of  the  world  to 
fall  more  heavily  on  those  who  could  not  or  would 
not  act  a  lie  ? 

What  if  you  had  been  a  rank  deserter,  a 
cowardly  slave,  taking  refuge  always  with  the 
stronger  side  ?  Ah  !  what  if  to  one  weary  traveller 
in  the  world,  in  the  steep  path  painfully  mounting, 
you  making  it  steeper  still  had  added  the  final  stone 
of  stumbling  and  despair? 

Better  to  be  effaced,  crazy,  criminal,  deformed, 
degraded.  Better,  instead  of  the  steep,  to  be  the 
most  dull,  flat,  and  commonplace  road. 


220     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

Better  to  go  clean  underfoot  of  all  weak  and  des- 
pised persons,  so  that  they  shall  not  even  notice  that 
you  are  there  ; 

None  so  rude  and  uneducated  but  you  shall 
go  underfoot  of  them;  none  so  criminal  but  you  shall, 
when  the  occasion  serves,  go  underfoot  of  them  ;  none 
so  outcast  but  they  shall  pass  along  you  and  not  even 
notice  that  you  are  there." 

In  Carpenter's  philosophy,  "  far  around 
and  beyond  whatever  is  exceptional  and 
illustrious  in  human  life  stretches  that  which 
is  average  and  unperceived."  His  love  of 
humanity  is  not  the  posing,  half-hearted 
philanthropy  of  gentlefolk,  but  an  under- 
standing of  the  pains  of  human  growth,  and 
a  loving  acceptance  of  all  limitations  of  the 
body  and  soul  by  one  who  is  seer  enough  to 
know  the  end. 

Of  love,  death's  twin,  Carpenter  has  much 
to  say.  Here  the  forerunner  is  indeed  in 
evidence,  for  he  holds  the  secret  how  to 
"  make  thyself  fit  for  the  perfect  love  which 
awaits,  and  which  can  alone  satisfy  thee." 
His   interpretation   of  love   is    far    enough 


CARPENTERS   MESSAGE     221 

removed  from  the  conventional  idea  of 
absorption,  possession,  almost  feudalistic 
tyranny.  It  is  the  love  of  the  real  lover 
who  only  wants  to  bless  and  not  to  hold 
to  give  and  not  to  take.  To  realise  ever 
so  little  Carpenter's  idea  of  love  is  to 
approach  the  time  when  there  will  be  no 
chains  and  no  vulgarity  in  love,  no  divorce 
courts,  no  revenge,  no  social  inquisition 
for  the  reform  of  personal  emotions,  no 
unselfish  selfishness,  for  there  will  be  only 
love  in  its  rare  loveliness,  which  makes  for 
life  and  breadth  and  joy  and  unity,  and 
which  cannot  hinder  or  injure,  simply 
because  it  is  love. 

Carpenter  has  realised  that  self-absorbed, 
possessive  love,  however  apparently  unselfish, 
is  death,  and  chains  the  one  who  gives  and 
the  one  who  takes. 

"  Who  loves  the  mortal  creature,  ending  there,  is 
no  more  free.     He  has  given  himself  away  to  death. 

For  him  the  slimy  black  form  lies  in  wait  at 
every  turn,  befouling  the  universe ; 


222     THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

Yet  he  who  loves  must  love  the  mortal,  and  he 
who  would  love  perfectly  must  be  free : 

(Love — glorious  though  it  be — is  a  disease  as  long 
as  it  destroys  or  even  impairs  the  freedom  of  the 
soul.) 

Therefore,  if  thou  wouldest  love,  withdraw  thyself 
from  love. 

Make  it  thy  slave,  and  all  the  miracles  of  nature 
shall  lie  in  the  palm  of  thy  hand." 

"  Return  into  thyself,  content  to  give,  but  asking 
no  one,  asking  nothing ; 

In  the  calm  light  of  His  splendour  who  fills  all  the 
universe,  the  imperishable,  indestructible  of  ages, 
dwell  thou,  as  thou  canst  dwell,  contented.1' 

Here,  again,  on  this  matter  of  love,  is 
the  apparent  contradiction,  the  plea  for 
the  personal,  which  is  right  and  good 
and  sweet,  and  the  denial  or  subjection 
of  it. 

"  Now  understand  me  well : 

There  is  no  desire  or  indulgence  that  is  forbidden ; 
there  is  not  one  good  and  another  evil.  All  are 
alike  in  this  respect.     In  place  all  are  to  be  used. 

Yet,  in  using,  be  not  entangled  in  them  ;  for  then 
already  they  are  bad,  and  will  cause  thee  suffering. 


CARPENTERS   MESSAGE     223 

When  thy  body,  as  needs  must  happen  at  times,  is 
carried  along  on  the  wind  of  passion,  say  not  thou, 
'  I  desire  this  or  that.' 

For  the  '  I ,  neither  desires  nor  fears  anything,  but 
is  free  and  in  everlasting  glory,  dwelling  in  heaven 
and  pouring  out  joy  like  the  sun  on  all  sides.  Let 
not  that  precious  thing  by  any  confusion  be  drawn 
down  and  entangled  in  the  world  of  opposites,  and 
of  death  and  suffering. 

For  as  a  lighthouse  beam  sweeps  with  incredible 
speed  over  sea  and  land,  yet  the  lamp  itself  moves 
not  at  all, 

So,  while  thy  body  of  desire  is  (and  must  be  by 
the  law  of  its  nature)  incessantly  in  motion  in  the 
world  of  suffering,  the  '  1 1  high  up  above  is  fixed  in 
heaven. 

Therefore,  I  say,  let  no  confusion  cloud  thy  mind 
about  this  matter ; 

But  ever  when  desire  knocks  at  thy  door, 

Though  thou  grant  it  admission  and  entreat  it 
hospitably,  as  in  duty  bound — 

Fence  it  yet  gently  off  from  thy  true  self, 

Lest  it  should  tear  and  rend  thee." 

"  Seek  not  the  end  of  love  in  this  act  or  in  that 
act,  lest  indeed  it  become  the  end  ; 

But  seek  this  act  and  that  act  and  thousands  of 
acts  whose  end  is  love. 

15 


224     THREE   MODERN    SEERS 

So  shalt  thou  at  last  create  that  which  thou  now 
desirest ;  and  then,  when  these  are  all  past  and  gone, 
there  shall  remain  to  thee  a  great  and  immortal 
possession,  which  no  man  can  take  away." 

All  the  way  through  Carpenter's  books, 
what  he  makes  us  feel  is,  that  nothing  and 
no  one  can  rob  us  of  our  real  life,  which  is 
from  within,  and  which  can  only  gradually 
develop  through  pain  and  loss  and  disen- 
tanglement, not  seen  as  these,  but  as  sheaths 
covering  the  new  life  of  the  soul. 

"  Not,"  he  says,  "  by  running  out  of  yourself  after 
it  conies  the  love  which  lasts  a  thousand  years. 

If  to  gain  another's  love  you  are  untrue  to  your- 
self, then  you  are  also  untrue  to  the  person  whose 
love  you  would  gain. 

Him  or  her  whom  you  seek  will  you  never  find 
that  way,  and  what  pleasure  you  have  with  them 
will  haply  only  end  in  pain. 

Remain  steadfast,  knowing  that  each  prisoner 
has  to  endure  in  patience  till  the  season  of  his 
liberation.  When  the  love  comes  which  is  for 
you,  it  will  turn  the  lock  easily  and  loose  your 
chains — 

Being    no   longer   whirled   about   nor   tormented 


CARPENTER'S   MESSAGE      225 

by  winds  of  uncertainty,   but  part   of  the    organic 

growth  of  God  himself  in  time — 

Another  column  in  the  temple  of  immensity — 
Two  voices  added  to  the  eternal  choir.1'' 

Edward  Carpenter  is  indeed  a  forerunner, 
not  only  of  a  robust  and  sane  democracy, 
but  of  a  sincere  spirituality,  a  spirituality 
which  cannot  be  content  to  preach  or  to 
merely  be  preached  to,  but  must  manifest 
itself  in  love.  Where  this  man's  great  value 
lies  is  in  his  absolute  belief  in  and  reverence 
for,  not  only  Nature  and  humanity,  but  that 
unnamable  something  behind  all  material 
manifestations  which  makes  the  whole 
scheme  of  things  logical  and  trustworthy. 
To  be  at  one  in  faith  with  this  is  to  have 
won  that  peace  which  passes  all  intellectual 
understanding ;  and  Carpenter  has  realised 
very  clearly  just  the  few  ways  in  which 
it  can  be  revealed.  In  Carpenter,  though 
you  find  the  spiritual  food  which  satisfies, 
you  also  find  the  necessary  warning  to 
retain   common    sense    and    sanity    by    his 


226     THREE   MODERN   SEERS 

plea  for  definite  democratic  action  in  this 
world. 

Like  Whitman,  he  believes  that  social 
regeneration  will  come  through  a  robust 
democracy.  He  would  say  to  a  believer  : 
"  Just  because  you  have  faith  in  these  inner 
things  do  your  practical  work  as  a  true  man 
or  woman.  Shun  nothing,  despise  no  one, 
and  do  the  thing  at  your  hand  as  perfectly 
as  it  is  possible  for  you  to  do  it.  The  deli- 
cate perceptions,  the  great  inner  knowledge, 
are  not  hindered,  but  strengthened  in  this 
way." 

In  England's  Ideal  he  gives  the  note  of 
warning  : 

"  Anyhow,11  he  says,  "  courage  is  better  than  con- 
ventionality. Take  your  stand  and  let  the  world 
come  round  to  you.  Do  not  think  you  are  right  and 
everybody  else  wrong.  If  you  think  you  are  wrong, 
then  you  may  be  right ;  but  if  you  think  you  are 
right,  then  you  are  certainly  wrong.  Your  deepest 
highest  moral  conceptions  are  only  for  a  time. 
They  have  to  give  place.  They  are  the  envelopes 
of  freedom,  that  eternal  freedom  which  cannot    be 


CARPENTER'S   MESSAGE      227 

represented,  that  peace  which  passes  understanding. 
Somewhere  here  is  the  invisible  vital  principle,  the 
seed  within  the  seed.  It  may  be  held  but  not 
thought,  felt  but  not  represented,  except  by  life  and 
history.  Every  individual,  so  far  as  he  touches  this, 
stands  at  the  source  of  social  progress." 

SELECTED  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Edward  Carpenter.     Towards  Democracy.     1883-1902. 
„  „  England's  Ideal.     1887-1902. 

„  ,,  Civilisation:  its  Cause  and  Cure.  1889- 

1906. 
„  ,,  Love's  Coming  of  Age.     1896-1906. 

„  „  Angels'  Wings.     1895. 

„  „  Adam's  Peak  to  Elephanta.     1892. 

„  „  The  Art  of  Creation.     1904,,  1907. 

„  „  Days  with   Walt   Whitman.     1906. 

,,  ,,  Sketches  from  Life  in  Town  and  Country. 

1908. 
Tom  Sm'an.  Edward  Carpenter:    the   Man  and  his 

Message. 
Ernest  Crosby.  Edward  Carpenter :  Poet  and  Prophet. 


Printed  by  Ilazell,  Watson  &  Vinty,  Ld.,  London  and  Aylesbury. 


Stanley  Paul's  6/-  Fiction. 


Young  Nick  and  Old  Nick. 

Bardely— The  Magnificent. 

A  New  Full-length  Novel  by  May  Wynne 

The  Crimson  Gate. 

Fear. 

Pretty  Barbara. 

That  is  to  say — 

Edward  and  I  and  Mrs.  Honeybun. 

A  Wild  Intrigue. 

The  .Second  Elopement. 

The  Feet  of  the  Years. 

Quaker  Robins. 

Plumage. 

The  Bungalow  Under  the  Lake. 

Love  Besieged. 

Angela. 

A  Will  in  a  Well. 

A  Splendid  Heritage. 

The  Cheerful  Knave. 

Tumult. 

An  Empress  in  Love. 

A  Lady  of  France. 

Love  in  Armour. 

The  Rose  of  Dauphiny. 

Lying  Lips. 

Golden  Aphrodite.     (Second  Edition.) 

The  Submarine  Girl. 

Tropical  Tales. 

The  Ohost  Pirates. 

Strange  Fire. 

The  Vortex. 

Shoes  of  Gold.     (Second  Edition.) 

Co -Heiresses. 

Love,  the  Thief.     (Fifth  Edition.) 

Stolen  Honey.     (Second  Edition.) 

Adventures  of  a  Pretty  Woman. 

Troubled  Waters.     (Second  Edition.) 

The  Flame  Dancer. 

The  Bottom  of  the  Well. 

In  Calvert's  Valley. 

The  Trickster. 

Did  She  Do  Right? 

The  City  of  the  Golden  Oate. 

The  Gay  Paradines. 

An  Adventure  in  Exile. 

The  Dream— and  the  Woman. 

The  Leveller. 

Gay  Lawless.     (Fourth  Edition.) 

Priests  of  Progress.     (Third  Edition.) 

A  Bishop's  Plight. 

The  Secret  Terror. 

Heartbreak  Hill. 

Banzai  1     (Second  Edition.) 

The  Broken  Snare. 

The  Chippendales. 


S.  R.  Crockett. 
Rafael  Sabatini. 

G.  Colmore. 

E.  Nesbit. 

Anthony  Dyllington. 

"  Rita." 

Kate  Horn. 

Hew  Scot. 

Herbert  Flowerdew. 

John  Dalison  Hyde. 

Wilfrid  L.  Randell. 
JCoralie  Stanton  and 
\  Heath  Hosken. 

Charles  E.  Pearce. 

Charles  E.  Pearce. 

St.  John  Trevor. 

E.  Everett-Green. 

Mrs.  Stephen  Batson. 

Keble  Howard. 

Wilkinson  Sherren. 

Fred  Whishaw. 

B.  Symons. 

Philip  L.  Stevenson. 

Philip  L.  Stevenson. 

William  Le  Queux. 

Winifred  Crispe. 

Edgar  Turner. 

Dolf  Wyllarde. 

W.  Hope  Hodgson. 

Christopher  Maughan. 

Fred  Whishaw. 

Hamilton  Drummond. 

E.  Everett-Green. 
Helen  Mathers. 

Ada  and  Dudley  James. 
Florence  Warden. 
Headon  Hill. 

F.  A.  Mathews. 

F.  Upham  Adams. 

M.  Prescott  Montague. 

G.  B.  Burgin. 

A.   |.  Macdonnell. 
E.  Everett-Green. 
Mrs.  Stephen  Batson. 
Richard  Duffy. 
Tom  Gallon. 
Alexander  McArthur. 
Helen  Mathers. 
G.  Colmore. 
Donald  Thane. 
"Brenda."  f 

Herman  K.  Viele. 
"  Parabellum." 
Ludwig  Lewisohn. 
Robert  Grant. 


STANLEY  PAUL  &  CO.,  i  Clifford's  Inn,  Temple  Bar,  LONDON,  E.C. 


An  Eighteenth  Century  Marquise. 

Emile    du    Chatelet    and    Her    Times. 

By  FRANK  HAMEL, 

Author  of  "  Famous  French  Salons,"  "  The  Dauphines  of  France,"  etc. 

In   one   volume,   demy   Svo,  cloth  gilt.      With   a  photo- 
gravure frontispiece  and  1 6  illustrations 
printed  on  art  paper. 

Among  all  the  famous  French  women  of  the  eighteenth  century 
none  represents  more  typically  certain  interesting  phases  of  social 
and  court  life  than  Madame  du  Chatelet.  Born  in  1706,  her  most 
impressionable  years  were  spent  under  the  Regency.  Highly 
educated,  she  was  preciaise  and  pedantic,  yet  womanly  and 
coquettish.  She  occupied  a  position  in  literature  and  philosophy 
which,  in  Saint  Beuve's  opinion,  it  was  easier  for  the  women  of 
her  day  to  smile  at  than  to  dispute.  Her  marriage  was  a  marriage 
of  convenience,  and  she  allowed  her  affections  to  stray  elsewhere. 
Her  liaison  with  Voltaire  lasted  fifteen  years,  through  storm  and 
stress,  passion  and  friendship,  fidelity  and  betrayal.  When  she  was 
no  longer  young,  she  fell  passionately  in  love  with  the  handsome 
poet-soldier,  St.  Lambert.  The  background  of  Mme.  du  Chatelet's 
life  forms  a  variegated  picture.  Salons  were  then  a  force.  The 
cafes  were  meeting  places  of  men  of  letters,  dramatists,  actors, 
artists,  men  of  the  robe,  soldiers,  and  scientists. 

Masculine  in  intellect,  ultra-feminine  in  her  emotions,  pre- 
eminently passionate,  yet  highly  endowed  with  reason,  the 
Marquise-mathematician  has  been  over-shadowed  by  the  great 
poet-philosopher  with  whom  she  lived,  and  has  not  before  been 
chosen  as  the  central  figure  of  a  biography  in  English. 


STANLEY  PAUL  &  CO., 
1  Clifford's  Inn,  London,  E.C. 


The  Dauphines  of  France. 

By  FRANK  HAMEL 

Author  of  "  Famous  French  Salons,"  etc. 

In  one  volume,  demy  Svo,  handsome  cloth  gilt,  gilt  top, 

with  a  photogravure  frontispiece  and  16  full-page 

illustrations  on  art  paper,  16s.  net. 

EARL  V  PRESS  OPINIONS. 

"  The  author  is  a  lively  memoir  writer  who  has  found  in  French 
history  an  abundant  supply  of  bait  wherewith  to  lure  a  greedy 
public. " —  Tiines. 

"Mr.  Hamel  has  worked  with  much  discretion,  aided  by  a  light 
hand,  a  fascinating  manner,  and  an  entire  ab..ence  of  pretentiousness. 
We  have  not  met  within  the  same  compass  so  faithful  and  complete 
a  revelation  of  the  life  of  the  Royalties  and  Noblesse.  We  are 
told  of  their  delight  in  pageants  aad  processions  and  banquets,  of 
their  childish  extravagance,  of  their  ceremonial  and  etiquette.  The 
portraits  in  this  entertaining  volume  are  instructive  and  admirably 
reproduced.  The  frontispiece  is  charming  enough  to  be  removed 
and  framed  on  its  own  merits  as  a  picture." — Outlook. 

"  Mr.  Hamel  is  the  first  writer  to  bring  together  in  one  volume 
the  fifteen  Dauphines  of  France.  Of  each  .of  the  Dauphines  Mr. 
Hamel  has  given  us  a  brief  but  finished  study." — Daily  Chronicle. 

"Mr.  Hamel  does  for  French  history  what  Miss  Strickland  did 
for  the  lives  of  the  English  queens.  An  admirable  volume." — 
Morning  Leader. 

"  Mr.  Hamel  has  the  right  touch,  and  treats  history  in  a  mood 
of  gay  vivacity.  The  various  studies  are  always  animated,  well 
informed,  and  excellently  phrased.  Certainly  these  stories  make 
romantic  reading,  and  Mr.  Hamel  handles  his  material  with 
dexterity  and  force.  In  his  glowing  pages  he  seizes  every  oppor- 
tunity for  lively  and  impressive  description." — Daily  Telegraph. 


STANLEY  PAUL  &  CO., 
i  Clifford's  Inn,  London,  E.C. 


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